Corn Cake
1 pint of corn meal. 1 pint of sweet milk. 2 eggs. 1 tablespoonful of butter. 2 tablespoonfuls of flour. 1 teaspoonful of salt.
Boil the milk and pour it over the meal, flour, and butter. Beat light. When cool, add eggs well beaten. Bake in a buttered pan.--Mrs. G. W. P.
A scalded-meal cornbread with no leavening at all — the lift comes entirely from beaten eggs and steam, so the handling of those eggs is what decides whether it rises or sits flat.
- Let the mush cool firstThe instruction "when cool, add eggs" is the hinge. Milk-scalded meal is near boiling; stirring eggs into it curdles them and you lose the only leavening in the recipe. Cool to warm-to-the-touch, then fold in the beaten eggs.
- MeasuresA pint is 2 cups. Two cups of cornmeal to two cups of milk gives a thick, spoonable batter rather than a pourable one — that is correct here.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh, unsoured whole milk. Nineteenth-century recipes distinguished it from clabbered or buttermilk, which would have called for saleratus to react with the acid.
- CornmealUse stone-ground white or yellow meal, medium grind. Modern degerminated supermarket meal is drier and finer; it will absorb the scalded milk faster, so give it a few minutes to slake before judging the consistency.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, as the book assumes a wood range. Bake at 400–425°F until set and browned, roughly 25–35 minutes in a buttered 8- or 9-inch pan or skillet.
- Beat the eggs hard"Well beaten" means to a pale froth, whites and yolks together or separately. With no baking powder, trapped air plus steam is all the rise this cake gets.
- YieldServes six to eight as a side bread. Best hot from the pan; without leavening or sugar it goes dense within a few hours.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and first published in 1878, gathers contributions from a large circle of Virginia housewives and carries numerous variations on corn bread, corn cake, batter bread and spoon bread — a fair index of how central maize was to Southern cooking, and how much finer the distinctions were than a modern reader expects. This version, scalded and eggy and unleavened, sits at the soft end of that family, near the sort of thing later described as spoon bread. Scalding the meal with hot liquid gelatinizes the starch and softens the coarse grind, a technique older than chemical leaveners and one that persisted in Southern kitchens after baking powder became common. The initials "Mrs. G. W. P." are typical of the book: recipes were credited by initial or family name, making the volume a record of a particular circle of households rather than a single author's work.