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Mother's Cake
1½ cups (¾ pint) yellow 1 teaspoonful baking powder corn meal 2 ozs. (1/4 cup) sugar 3 gills (1½ cups) sour milk 2 ozs. (1/2 cup) flour ½ teaspoonful salt 1 teaspoonful baking soda 1 tablespoonful melted butter or lard Put the sugar into a basin, add the corn meal, flour, baking powder, salt, soda, and the milk. Beat well, then add the melted butter or lard and pour into a buttered and floured shallow earthenware dish.
Bake in a moderate oven for thirty-five minutes.
A plain cornmeal cake of the sour-milk school, baked in the earthenware dish the book is built around. The transcription is garbled in places, so read the measurements with care before you begin.
- The quantitiesThe corn meal reads 1½ cups (¾ pint) and the salt ½ teaspoonful, both as printed on the page. The flour, sugar and milk figures are internally consistent as printed.
- GillsA gill is half a cup, so 3 gills is 1½ cups, exactly as the original notes. The book gives weights alongside cup volumes throughout, which may be an accommodation to both British and American readers.
- Sour milkThis means naturally soured raw milk, acidic enough to react with the soda. Pasteurised milk left out spoils rather than souring cleanly; use buttermilk cup for cup, or milk with a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar stirred in and left ten minutes.
- Both leavenersThe soda is there for the acid in the milk, the baking powder as insurance. Mix and bake without delay once the milk goes in, since most of the lift happens in the first few minutes.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350F by modern conversion. Thirty-five minutes suits a shallow dish; the top should be set and lightly coloured and a skewer clean at the centre.
- EarthenwareAn unglazed or stoneware dish heats slowly and holds heat, which gives a thicker, softer crust than metal. Butter and flour it well, and do not put a cold earthenware dish into a hot oven if it is old or thin.
- FatA single tablespoon is very little by modern cornbread standards, so the crumb is lean and dry rather than cakey. The recipe treats butter and lard as interchangeable.
- YieldDepends on the dish, which the recipe does not size. It is at its best warm, cut in the dish, and served with butter; the small amount of sugar suggests a bread to eat with a stew or soup rather than a dessert cake.
The name is the giveaway: "Mother's Cake" is the kind of title attached to a household standby rather than a formal confection, and despite the word cake this is corn bread — mostly meal, barely sweetened, leavened with soda against sour milk. Recipes of this shape were everywhere in nineteenth-century American cookery, where corn meal was cheaper than wheat flour and the day's leftover milk soured reliably in a warm kitchen; the 2 ounces of wheat flour here is a small concession to tenderness. Its appearance in a casserole-dish book reflects the vogue for earthenware and fireproof china cookery in the early twentieth century.