Indian Bread
Beat two eggs very light, mix alternately with them one pint of sour milk or buttermilk, and one pint of fine corn meal. Melt one tablespoonful of butter, and add to the mixture. Dissolve one teaspoonful of soda in a small portion of the milk, and add to the other ingredients, last of all. Beat hard and bake in a pan, in a hot oven.
A plain buttermilk cornbread with no wheat flour and no sugar, leavened entirely by soda reacting with sour milk. It comes together in under five minutes, so have the pan hot before you start mixing.
- "Indian" means cornIndian meal is cornmeal. This is a pure cornbread with no wheat flour, so expect a dense, crumbly loaf rather than a cakey one; the recipe specifies fine meal, so the crumb will be less coarse than with a coarse grind.
- Hot ovenThe book gives no temperatures. "Hot oven" in period usage is generally read as somewhere around 425-450F. Preheat fully; a slow start gives a pale, heavy bread.
- MeasuresOne pint is two cups. Two cups meal to two cups sour milk gives a batter that pours rather than mounds, which is correct here.
- Sour milkCultured buttermilk is the direct substitute. Modern pasteurised milk left out does not sour the same way and should not be used; if you have neither, a tablespoon of vinegar or lemon juice stirred into a cup of milk will supply the acid the soda needs.
- Add the soda last, and moveThe teaspoon of soda dissolved in a little of the milk goes in at the end because it begins releasing gas the instant it meets the acid. Beat hard, pour, and get it into the oven — batter that sits on the counter loses its lift.
- The panThe recipe says only "a pan." A greased 8- or 9-inch cast-iron skillet or square pan, heated in the oven first, will give a good crust; grease it with butter or bacon fat.
- Timing and yieldThe original gives none. Figure roughly 20-25 minutes in a hot oven, until the top is set and browned and a tester comes out clean. It should serve six to eight, cut in wedges or squares.
- SaltThere is none in the list. A half teaspoon stirred into the meal is worth adding.
"Indian bread" and "Indian meal" were the standard English-language terms for maize and maize flour from the colonial period well into the nineteenth century, distinguishing it from wheat, which was simply "flour." Recipes like this one — meal, sour milk, soda, an egg or two, no sugar and no wheat — represent the older Southern cornbread tradition, before soft winter wheat flour and sweetening became common in the batter. Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1878, gathered contributions from Virginia households and includes a long run of corn breads, batter breads and pones, which says something about how central cornmeal remained to Virginia cooking a decade after the Civil War. The reliance on soured milk rather than commercial baking powder is a good period marker: soda plus an acid dairy product was the cheap, reliable leavening in a kitchen where milk soured on its own every day.