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Old-Fashioned Egg Bread
1 pint of meal. 3 eggs well beaten. 1 teaspoonful of salt. 1 tablespoonful melted butter.
Add enough sweet milk to make a rather thin batter. Bake quickly.--Mrs. S.T. Another Recipe for Egg Bread. 1 quart of milk. 3 eggs. 1 tablespoonful of butter. 1 pint of corn meal. 1 teaspoonful of salt.
Beat the eggs very light and add to the other ingredients. Bake in a pan or dish. Add a little soda dissolved in milk, if you desire it.--Mrs. I. H.
Two versions of the same Virginia staple, one a stiff batter bread and one nearly a spoonbread. Both are written for a cook who already knows what egg bread looks like going into the oven, so the useful work is in the measures and the heat.
- "Meal" means white cornmeal"Meal" almost certainly means cornmeal -- the second recipe spells it out as "corn meal." In Virginia household books of this period unqualified meal was usually finely ground white cornmeal rather than yellow, though the recipe itself does not specify. Stone-ground gives the closest texture to the original.
- A pint is a volume, not a poundA pint of cornmeal is 2 cups, roughly 9-10 oz depending on grind. A quart of milk in the second recipe is 4 cups.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, as opposed to buttermilk or clabber. Whole milk is the right substitute.
- "Bake quickly" is 425-450F"Bake quickly" means a hot oven -- the book gives no temperatures, but 425-450F is a reasonable modern reading. Egg bread depends on heat to set the outside fast while the inside stays moist; a moderate oven tends toward a dense, pasty crumb.
- Heat the pan firstConsider heating the pan first -- neither recipe says to, but putting the greased pan or skillet in the oven until the fat shimmers before pouring in the batter is the usual way to get a crisp bottom crust on a batter bread.
- The second recipe is much wetterA quart of milk to a pint of meal, against an unmeasured "enough sweet milk" in the first. It bakes to something close to spoonbread, eaten with a spoon rather than cut in squares. Use a deep dish, not a shallow pan.
- The soda is optional for a reasonWith sweet milk there is no acid for soda to work on, so it contributes little beyond a slight browning and a faint soapiness if overdone. If you want the lift, use buttermilk in its place and no more than 1/2 teaspoon of soda.
- Timing and donenessThe stiffer version takes about 25-30 minutes in a 9-inch pan; the wetter one 40-50 minutes in a 2-quart dish, until puffed and just set at the centre. Either serves six alongside a meal.
Egg bread is closely related to what most Southern cooks now call cornbread or, in its wetter form, spoonbread, and its defining feature is that eggs and milk do much of the leavening work. Housekeeping in Old Virginia, whose first edition is usually given as 1878, edited by Marion Cabell Tyree, was assembled from contributions by named and initialled Virginia housekeepers, which is why the same dish appears twice in slightly different hands, credited to Mrs. S.T. and Mrs. I.H. It records family practice, not a single authority. The reliance on white cornmeal rather than yellow is a regional marker that still holds across much of the upper South, and the offhand "add a little soda if you desire it" catches the moment when chemical leavening was available but not yet assumed.