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Plain Corn Bread
1 pint sifted meal. 1 teaspoonful salt. Cold water sufficient to make a stiff dough.
Work well with the hands, pat out in long, narrow pones, six or seven inches long and as wide as the wrist. Bake quickly in a hot pan.--Mrs. P. W.
This is corn pone in its oldest form: meal, salt, water, and heat. Nothing binds it but the starch in the cornmeal, so the handling of the dough and the heat of the pan are the whole recipe.
- The hinge: a genuinely hot pan"Bake quickly in a hot pan" implies the pan is already hot before the pones are laid in. A cold pan gives a pale, gummy pone. In a modern kitchen a well-preheated cast-iron skillet or griddle (a hot oven, around 450F) is a reasonable equivalent, though the recipe itself gives no temperature.
- A pint of mealMeasured by volume, about 2 cups of cornmeal, roughly 9-10 oz by weight. Expect around 3/4 to 1 cup of water to bring it to a stiff dough; the amount varies with how finely the meal is ground and how dry it is.
- The meal itselfMany old Virginia recipes assume white, stone-ground meal, coarser and more absorbent than modern degerminated supermarket meal; note that this recipe calls for the meal to be sifted. Stone-ground white meal will give a texture closest to what the recipe expects.
- Hot water helpsThe instruction says cold water, and it works, but scalding water gelatinises some of the starch and makes the dough easier to pat into shape without cracking. That is a departure from what is written here.
- ShapingSix or seven inches long and "as wide as the wrist" suggests roughly two inches across; the recipe gives no thickness, so pat them fairly thin. Wet or greased hands keep the dough from sticking.
- TimeNo time is given, and the recipe says only to bake quickly. In a hot oven expect somewhere in the region of 25-30 minutes, turning the pones once halfway if you want both sides crusted, but check early. They are done when the outside is hard and deep gold and the pone sounds hollow when tapped.
- No leavening, and that is intentionalThere is no soda, no buttermilk, no egg. The result is dense and close-grained, meant to be broken rather than sliced, and eaten hot with butter, bacon fat, or greens and their liquor.
- YieldAbout four pones, enough for four people as a bread course. It is best within the hour; leftover pone was sometimes split and re-crisped in fat.
Corn pone is one of the oldest continuously made breads in North America: the word pone comes into English from an Algonquian term for something baked, recorded by early Virginia colonists, and the bread itself descends directly from Native cooking with nixtamal-free ground maize. Plain pone of this kind, meal and salt and water only, was cheap, kept no perishable ingredients, and could be baked on a board propped by the fire or a hot skillet or, by a tradition often repeated though hard to verify, on a hoe blade which is why it belonged as much to field and cabin kitchens as to the plantation house. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named Virginia housekeepers, prints a number of corn breads, and the presence of this stripped-down version alongside richer egg-and-milk batter breads shows the range a Virginia cook was expected to command. The attribution to "Mrs. P. W." is typical of the book's method: recipes gathered from real households and credited by initial.