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Batter Bread (One cup meal one cup sweet)
One cup meal, one cup sweet milk, one cup butter-milk, two eggs, one tablespoonful butter, one tablespoonful flour, half teaspoonful of salt, and same of soda. Bake in cups. Mrs. G.
A short, loose spoonbread batter baked in individual cups. The proportions are as written — one cup of meal against two cups of liquid plus eggs — so expect a pourable batter, not a dough.
- Meal means cornmealIn Virginia cookbooks of this period "meal" generally denotes white cornmeal, and self-rising meal is not what is intended. Stone-ground white meal gives the closest texture; yellow meal works but tends to taste sweeter and more assertive.
- The batter is meant to be thinTwo cups of liquid to one cup of meal produces something closer to a thick pancake batter than a bread dough. Do not compensate with extra meal — the loose batter is what makes the interior soft and custardy rather than crumbly.
- Soda and buttermilkThe half teaspoon of soda reacts with the acid in the buttermilk, and the carbon dioxide from that reaction is what lifts the batter. Mix and get it into the oven promptly; much of the lift is lost if the batter stands.
- "Bake in cups"Buttered custard cups, ramekins, or a standard muffin tin. Fill about two-thirds, since the batter rises and then settles. Grease generously — cornmeal batters stick.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. A hot oven, around 425°F, for 20 to 25 minutes suits individual cups: set at the edges, still moist at the center. Lower and slower gives a denser, wetter result.
- Butter and flourThe recipe does not say how to add the butter; melting it and stirring it in with the liquids is the simplest course. The single tablespoon of flour is too little to be structural and most likely acts as a binder against the coarseness of the meal.
- Yield and servingAbout six to eight cups. Serve immediately, hot, with butter — batter bread collapses and firms as it cools and is not good reheated.
"Batter bread" is the older Virginia name for what most of the country now calls spoonbread: a cornmeal batter enriched with eggs and milk, baked until it is soft enough to be eaten with a spoon rather than sliced. It sits at the wet end of a family of Southern corn breads that runs from dry hoecake through corn pone to this, and its softness is generally traced to the fine, soft white cornmeal milled in the Upper South. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) prints several versions of it under different contributors' initials — Mrs. G. here — which is a fair picture of how the book was assembled: Marion Cabell Tyree gathered receipts from named and initialed Virginia housekeepers, so competing versions of the same household staple sit side by side with no attempt to reconcile them.