Corn Bread Baking with Shortening

The ingredient list as printed is incomplete — the dry ingredients this method depends on were lost in transcription, and the milk appears twice. Treat it as a method to be read alongside a full cornmeal ratio rather than a shopping list.

• What is missingThe instructions say "mix all dry ingredients," but only baking powder is listed. A corn bread of this era and volume would call for roughly 1 cup cornmeal, 1 cup flour, 2 to 4 tablespoons sugar and a teaspoon of salt. Anything more precise would be invention on our part.
• The milk problemBoth "2 C milk" and "1 C milk" appear, the second stranded after the signature. Which was intended cannot be recovered: with the dry ingredients missing there is no ratio to check either figure against, though 2 cups against 2 eggs would give a notably thin, pourable batter.
• "14 C shortening"Read this as 1/4 cup, a fraction bar lost in printing. That is 4 tablespoons — butter works in its place, melted and cooled slightly so it does not cook the yolks.
• Moderate ovenThe recipe gives no temperature. "Moderate" was conventionally somewhere in the 350F to 375F band; at the upper end the same batter will be done sooner, so check before the end of the stated range if your oven runs hot.
• Time versus panNo pan is named. Thirty-five to forty minutes points to something reasonably deep rather than a shallow sheet, in which the batter would dry out well before the time was up. A skewer in the centre should come out clean.
• Why the separated eggsFolding in stiffly beaten whites is the hinge of this version. It lightens a batter that has no buttermilk-and-soda lift, so fold in two additions and stop while streaks are still faintly visible; overmixing here loses the whole point of the extra step.
• YieldBaked in an 8-inch square it would cut into about nine generous squares. Cornbread of this style stales fast -- it is meant for the same meal it is baked for.