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Corn Cake
1 C sifted wheat flour 2 t baking powder 2 T sugar 1 egg 1/2 C yellow corn meal 12 t salt 1 C sweet milk 2 T melted butter or lard Beat well and bake in muffin pans or a loaf as desired. Mrs. Lillian Sutton.
A plain baking-powder corn bread of the kind church books print by the dozen. The original assumes you know your own oven and your own pans, so the two things it leaves out are the temperature and the time.
- The salt is a typesetting errorThe salt still reads "12 t," which cannot be right for a batter built on one cup of flour; use 1/2 teaspoon. Twelve teaspoons would be some two and a half ounces of salt and inedible.
- C, T, tC is a cup, T a tablespoon, t a teaspoon, and the measures are the same as ours. These abbreviations were in general use in American cookbooks by the turn of the twentieth century.
- Sweet milkOrdinary fresh whole milk, named to distinguish it from the sour milk or buttermilk that other recipes on the same page would call for. Those need soda; this one uses baking powder and does not.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Corn bread of this proportion wants a hot oven, 425F for muffins and 400F for a loaf pan.
- TimingMuffins run 15 to 20 minutes, an 8-inch square or small loaf 25 to 30. It is done when the centre springs back and the edges have pulled from the pan.
- Lard or butterEither works. Lard gives a slightly more tender crumb and a plainer flavour; butter browns the crust faster, so watch the last five minutes.
- Do not overbeat"Beat well" belongs to an era of hand whisks. With modern flour, mix only until the dry streaks disappear, or the crumb turns tough and tunnelled.
- YieldAbout eight to ten muffins, or one 8-inch square pan.
Corn bread leavened with chemical baking powder rather than eggs and long beating spread in the second half of the nineteenth century, and this ratio -- roughly two parts wheat flour to one part cornmeal, with sugar and sweet milk -- belongs to the sweetened, wheat-heavy style generally associated with the North and Midwest, as against the all-cornmeal, unsweetened, buttermilk-and-soda corn bread more usual in the South. Community and society cookbooks of this kind were commonly compiled to raise funds, with each recipe credited to the woman who contributed it.