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Corn Bread
3 gills (1½ cups) yellow corn meal 1/2 pint (I cup) sweet milk 1/2 pint (1 cup) buttermilk ½ teaspoonful baking soda 1 teaspoonful salt 2 eggs Mix the milks, soda, salt, and the eggs well beaten, then beat them into the meal.
Butter a casserole, set it in the oven till hot, pour in the batter to the depth of three-quarters of an inch, and bake in a hot oven till ready.
A flourless, sugarless buttermilk corn bread of the Southern type, written for the glazed earthenware dishes this book is built around. Two things carry it: the preheated buttered dish and the shallow depth of batter.
- Preheat the dish, not just the ovenButtering the casserole and heating it empty until the butter sizzles is the whole point of the method — the batter sets on contact and forms the crisp bottom crust. Pour and get it back in the oven immediately.
- "Hot oven"Conventionally taken as somewhere around 425-450°F. At that heat a three-quarter-inch layer should be done in roughly 20 to 25 minutes; the recipe itself says only "till ready," so go by a browned top and a clean skewer.
- Gills and pintsA gill is half a cup, so 3 gills is the 1½ cups the recipe helpfully glosses; a half pint is 1 cup. The parenthetical conversions in the original are correct.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk — whole milk. It is named to distinguish it from the buttermilk used alongside it.
- The soda is highOne and a half teaspoons of soda is more than a cup of buttermilk can neutralise, and the excess tends to read as a soapy, faintly metallic taste. About three-quarters of a teaspoon suits a cup of modern cultured buttermilk.
- Depth matters more than dish sizeKeep to three-quarters of an inch. In a deeper dish this batter — no flour, no fat in the mix — turns to a damp pudding in the middle before the top colours. A 9- or 10-inch round or square dish takes the full quantity; anything smaller, bake in two lots.
- Meal grindUse a plain yellow cornmeal, not self-rising cornmeal mix (which already contains flour, leavening and salt) and not coarse polenta grind, which will not hydrate in the time given.
- YieldSix to eight squares. It is at its best within the hour; with no flour or sugar to hold it, it dries out by the next day.
Casserole cookery had a vogue in English and American kitchens, when glazed earthenware and the new fireproof dishes promised fuel economy and food that came to table in the vessel it cooked in — hence a whole book of recipes organised around a pot rather than a cuisine, with a bread chapter attached. The bread itself is the Southern kind: cornmeal, buttermilk and soda, with no wheat flour and no sugar, a formula that assumes corn bread is a savoury accompaniment to dinner rather than a sweet cake. Soda-and-sour-milk leavening spread quickly through nineteenth-century American baking once commercial saleratus and then baking soda became cheap, and the pairing survived in corn bread long after chemical baking powders had taken over elsewhere. The instruction to heat the greased dish before the batter goes in is the earthenware equivalent of the greased cast-iron spider set on the coals, which is generally taken to be where the crust-first technique comes from.