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Batter Bread (Four cups of meal two cups)
Four cups of meal, two cups sweet milk, four eggs, two table-spoonfuls flour, one tablespoonful lard, one teaspoonful salt, half teaspoonful soda.--Mrs. F.
A typical Virginia receipt of the period: a list of proportions and nothing else, on the assumption that the cook already knew what a batter bread was and how long it wanted in the oven. Here is what has to be supplied.
- Meal"Meal" here is almost certainly cornmeal, and in a Virginia receipt of this date that would usually mean white meal, often water-ground and finer and softer than most modern yellow meal. Fine white cornmeal gives the closest result; coarse stone-ground meal will drink more liquid and bake up grittier.
- The batter is too stiff as writtenThe batter is stiff as written -- Four cups of meal against two cups of milk and four eggs produces a thick paste rather than a pourable batter. Spoon breads generally carry a good deal more liquid than meal, so add milk until the mixture pours sluggishly from the spoon; the original cook would have judged this by eye.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, as opposed to buttermilk or clabber. Whole milk.
- The soda has nothing to act onHalf a teaspoon of soda with sweet milk and no acid will not lift the bread and can leave a faint soapy taste. Either use buttermilk in place of the sweet milk, or leave the soda out and rely on the eggs, which are the real leavening here.
- LardOne tablespoon of lard, melted and stirred in warm. Butter or bacon drippings substitute directly.
- Oven and vesselThe receipt gives no oven or vessel at all. Modern practice for a batter bread of this size is a well-greased deep dish or iron skillet at about 350F for roughly 45 minutes, until set in the centre and browned on top. Greasing and heating the dish before the batter goes in gives a better crust.
- ServingThis is a spoon bread: it is scooped out with a spoon onto the plate and eaten hot with butter, as a side dish rather than sliced bread. Four cups of meal makes a large dish, enough for a sizeable table.
In Virginia "batter bread" and "spoon bread" are the same thing, and the older of the two names: a soft cornmeal pudding bound with eggs and eaten with a spoon, distinct from the drier egg bread or corn pone baked in cakes. It belongs to a family of soft cornmeal dishes often traced back through colonial cookery to Native American preparations of ground maize, and it stayed on Virginia tables long after wheat flour had become cheap and common. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878) was compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named housekeepers across the state; this one carries only the initial "Mrs. F." and is written as proportions rather than a method. Contributors were writing for other experienced cooks, and the baking of a batter bread was assumed knowledge; the book prints several versions of it, each slightly different, which is a fair picture of how the dish actually varied from household to household.