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Light Corn Bread
Pour one quart of boiled milk over one pint of corn meal. Add a teaspoonful of salt, a teaspoonful of cream of tartar, half teaspoonful of soda, three well beaten eggs, four tablespoonfuls of flour, a little butter.--Miss E. P.
A near-spoonbread batter: a quart of milk to a pint of meal is twice the liquid most modern corn breads carry, so expect a soft, custardy interior rather than a crumb you can slice cleanly. The recipe gives no pan, oven or time, so the notes below fill those gaps.
- The hinge: let the meal swellPouring boiled (scalded) milk over the meal gelatinises the starch and is what keeps this from being gritty. Stir it together and leave it ten to fifteen minutes until it thickens and cools to warm before the eggs go in, or the eggs will curdle.
- Measure by volume, not weightOne pint of cornmeal is 2 cups; one quart of milk is 4 cups. Four tablespoons of flour is a quarter cup. "A little butter" is unquantified; a tablespoon or two, melted, is a reasonable reading.
- Cream of tartar and sodaThis pair works as a homemade baking powder. A teaspoon of cream of tartar to half a teaspoon of soda is close to the conventional 2:1 ratio, but it starts working the moment it is wet, so add both last and get the batter into a hot pan immediately.
- The meal itselfSouthern corn bread of this period usually meant white, water-ground meal, generally finer and softer than the yellow degerminated meal sold today. Fine stone-ground white cornmeal is the closest match; coarse yellow meal will read as a different dish.
- Pan and ovenBake in a buttered 9- or 10-inch cast-iron skillet or a 2-quart baking dish, preheated and greased. The recipe gives no oven or time; around 425F for 35 to 45 minutes suits a batter this wet, until the top is browned and the centre only just set.
- No sugarThere is none in the original. Southern corn breads of this era were generally savoury.
- Yield and servingServes six to eight. Because of the liquid ratio it is best spooned out hot, with butter, straight from the dish.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housekeepers, prints several corn breads: stiff pones, batter cakes for breakfast, and soft, egg-rich versions like this one. "Light" here appears to mean leavened and tender rather than low in fat; cream of tartar and soda were a common chemical leaven in American home kitchens in the second half of the nineteenth century, sold as two separate tins before packaged baking powder became universal. The high proportion of milk and eggs pushes this toward what would later be called spoonbread, a dish generally traced to the same tradition of scalded-meal batters and often said to descend from Native American cornmeal mushes adapted to European baking. Many contributions in the book are credited by initials, as here.