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Golden Corn Bread
1 C milk. ¾ C corn meal 12 t salt 1¼ C flour 14 C sugar 5 t baking powder 1 egg 1 or 2 T melted butter Mix and sift dry ingredients, add milk, well beaten egg and melted butter. Bake in shallow buttered pan in a hot oven 20 minutes. Florence Lovell.
A plain baking-powder corn bread of the kind that filled church-supper bread baskets. The proportions follow the standard early-twentieth-century "corn cake" formula, with rather more flour than cornmeal, which gives a light, cake-like crumb rather than a coarse Southern-style pone.
- Hot oven"Hot oven" in books of this period is usually taken as somewhere around 400-450F; the recipe itself gives no temperature. Twenty minutes in a shallow pan should do; the bread should be springy in the centre and pulling from the sides.
- The milk is not quantifiedThe instructions call for milk but no amount is given in the ingredient list. A batter of this type takes about 3/4 to 1 cup, added until it pours thickly but still holds a ribbon off the spoon. Add it gradually and judge by the batter.
- Fractions in the measurementsRead the quantities as 3/4 cup cornmeal, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1/4 cup flour and 1/4 cup sugar, against 5 teaspoons baking powder. That is a great deal of leavening for roughly a cup of dry ingredients and can leave a soapy taste.
- Baking powder then and nowSome baking powders of the period were single-acting or weaker than today's, and recipes often called for generous amounts. With modern double-acting powder, considerably less than 5 teaspoons would be needed here.
- Cornmeal grindThe recipe does not specify the grind; a fine or medium meal suits this sort of batter. Coarse stone-ground meal will drink more liquid and give a grittier crumb; if that is what you have, let the batter stand ten minutes before baking.
- The pan"Shallow buttered pan" is not specified further; an 8-inch square or a 9-inch round would suit. Cast iron gives a crisper bottom crust.
- YieldAbout nine squares from an 8-inch pan. Like most corn breads it is best eaten fresh.
Community cookbooks like this one, sold to raise money for a congregation, are essentially indexes of what one town actually cooked, each contribution signed by its donor. "Golden corn bread" is often read as the northern, sweetened, wheat-heavy branch of the corn bread family: sugar in the batter, more flour than meal, and baking powder rather than the sour milk and saleratus of earlier generations. The formula is close enough to the corn cake printed in Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book that most such church-book versions are best understood as household adaptations of that widely owned text, passed hand to hand and adjusted for the family's taste for sweetness.