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Favorite Dishes in Famous Homes: Whites
Filling for Tart 1 pound chopped walnuts, Whites 2 eggs, Lemon juice and sugar to taste.
From Mrs. Robert L. Taylor, wife of U. S. Senator from Tennessee.
Steamed Corn Bread. 2 cupfuls sweet milk, 1 cupful butter, 3 cupfuls cornmeal, 1 cupful flour, 1 egg, 1 teaspoonful soda, 1 teaspoonful salt, cupful molasses.
Mix ingredients, beat thoroughly, and pour into pail, with tight-fitting lid. Cook in vessel of boiling water two and a half hours. Turn out on a pan, and brown in oven.
From Mrs. Robert S. Vessey, wife of Governor of South Dakota.
Brown Bread. 1 cupful sweet milk, 2 cupfuls sour milk, 2 cupfuls cornmeal, 1 cupful flour, cupful molasses, 1½ teaspoonfuls soda, 1 teaspoonful salt.
Sift dry materials, pour in molasses and milk, then beat hard and pour in a greased mold. Steam three hours and dry in a hot oven a few minutes. This mixture is very thin, but makes a delicious bread..
From Mrs. G. W. Donaghey, wife of Governor of Arkansas.
Three short contributions from the wives of public officials, printed in the telegraphic style of a charity cookbook: quantities, no method to speak of, and a few fractions lost in setting the type. Two are steamed breads, which are more forgiving than they look.
- Missing fractionsBoth bread recipes call simply for "cupful molasses," with the numeral dropped in printing. Comparable steamed brown breads of the period use ½ to ¾ cup, and that is the sensible range; the original as printed is genuinely ambiguous.
- The tart filling is a filling onlyNo crust, no oven, no time is given. Presumably it was meant for a pastry shell and then baked, but the book says nothing about the shell, gives no pan size, and does not say whether the whites are beaten before going in with a pound of chopped walnuts.
- Sweet milk and sour milk"Sweet milk" is ordinary fresh milk. "Sour milk" is naturally clabbered raw milk, which pasteurised milk will not reproduce; use buttermilk cup for cup. The acid is what the soda needs to raise the brown bread.
- CornmealPeriod cornmeal was stone-ground and coarser than most supermarket meal. A medium or coarse grind gives the right crumb; fine degerminated meal makes a pastier loaf.
- A cupful of butter in the corn breadThat is 8 ounces against four cups of dry ingredients (3 cornmeal, 1 flour), very rich for a steamed bread and unusual next to the brown bread's none. Taken at face value it produces a heavy, almost pudding-like loaf.
- The pail and the moldAny lidded, heatproof cylindrical container works — a coffee tin, pudding basin, or 2-quart pudding mold. Grease it, fill no more than two-thirds, cover tightly, and set it on a rack in a pot with boiling water reaching halfway up. Top up with boiling water as it evaporates; the pot must not run dry over two and a half or three hours.
- "Brown in oven" and "a hot oven a few minutes"No temperature is given in the book; a period "hot oven" is generally taken as somewhere in the region of 400-450F. Five to ten minutes uncovered is enough to dry the sticky surface a steamed loaf always has; longer and the crust hardens.
- Yield and servingEach recipe makes a single steamed loaf; no yield is stated. Steamed brown bread was eaten warm with butter, classically alongside baked beans, and it slices far more cleanly the day after.
Cookbooks assembled from the kitchens of governors' and senators' wives were a staple fundraising genre in the years around 1909-1912, and the appeal was the names as much as the food — a reader in Arkansas could cook what Mrs. Donaghey cooked. What the contributions actually show is how standard the American steamed bread still was: no oven required, just a covered pail in a kettle, a technique inherited from the pudding cloths and boiled puddings of British cookery and carried on in New England with cornmeal and molasses in place of wheat and suet. Molasses did double duty as sweetener and as the acid partner to saleratus before commercial baking powder was universal, and its cheapness kept it in the recipe long after that reason had passed. The walnut tart filling belongs to a different tradition altogether — the nut-and-egg-white confections that filled Southern tarts and layer cakes, where a pound of walnuts was a display of plenty rather than an economy.