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Batter Bread (Break two eggs into a bowl)
Break two eggs into a bowl. Beat to a stiff froth. Pour in one teacup of clabber or butter-milk, one of water, one of corn meal, one of flour, half teaspoonful of salt, a heaping teaspoonful of butter melted. Beat all well together. Have already heated on the stove or range, iron-clad muffin moulds (eight or ten in a group). Grease them well with a clean rag, dipped in lard. Fill each one nearly full with the batter, first sifting in half a teaspoonful soda. Set in a hot oven and bake a nice brown. Oblong shapes are the nicest. If preferred, sweet milk may be used instead of sour milk and water. In this case add another egg and dispense with the soda.--Mrs. S.T.
A soft cornmeal-and-wheat batter baked in preheated cast-iron gem pans. The whole point is the screaming-hot greased mould, which sets a crust the instant the batter hits it.
- Heat the pans firstThe muffin moulds go on the stove or range before the batter goes in, and are greased with a rag dipped in lard once hot. Filling cold pans gives a paler, heavier gem rather than the crisp shell this recipe is after.
- TeacupA teacup of the period is usually reckoned at around 6 fl oz, roughly three-quarters of a modern cup, though the book does not define it. Since all four wet and dry measures use the same cup, any consistent vessel of that size will keep the proportions right.
- Hot ovenThe book gives no temperatures; "hot oven" is conventionally read as somewhere around 400-450F. At lower heat the thin batter dries out before it rises.
- ClabberNaturally soured raw milk, thickened to a curd. Cultured buttermilk is the working substitute; do not attempt to clabber pasteurised milk on the counter, as it spoils rather than sours.
- Soda at the last momentThe soda is sifted in at the point of filling the moulds rather than mixed in earlier. Its reaction with the buttermilk begins immediately, so batter that stands will lose some lift.
- Corn mealSouthern batter breads of this period used fine white water-ground meal, not the coarse yellow granules sold as polenta. Fine stone-ground white cornmeal is closest.
- The sweet-milk versionWith fresh milk there is no acid for the soda to work on, hence the third egg doing the lifting instead. That version is denser and more custardy.
- Yield and timingEight to ten gems, to judge by the group of moulds. The recipe gives no time, only "bake a nice brown". Serve them straight from the mould; they toughen as they cool.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives, carries a whole cluster of things called batter bread, from spoon-baked custardy versions eaten with a fork to these oven-baked gems. The name is usually explained as referring to a bread thin enough to pour rather than knead, a category that mattered in households where flour was costlier than meal and corn the daily grain; stretching meal with an equal measure of flour, as here, was a middling compromise. The reliance on clabber and soda rather than yeast reflects a kitchen where bread was wanted at a particular meal and could not wait on a rise, and the iron gem pans belong to the same logic of speed. Attributions like "Mrs. S.T." run throughout the book, which was assembled as a network of household contributions rather than the work of a single author.