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Corn Bread with Sour Milk
One cupful of sour milk, 1 cupful of sweet milk, 2 cupfuls of corn-meal, 1 cupful of flour, 1½ cupful of sugar, 1/2 tablespoonfuls of melted butter or lard, 1 teaspoonful of salt, 1 teaspoonful of soda, 2 eggs. Add butter to milk, then the sugar, salt, soda, eggs, flour and meal. Beat quickly and well. Bake half an hour in a very hot oven.
A plain sour-milk corn bread of the northern, lightly sweetened type. It comes together in one bowl and depends entirely on the soda meeting the acid in the milk, so speed matters more than technique.
- Sour milkThis means raw milk left to clabber, not spoiled pasteurised milk, which simply goes bad. Use cultured buttermilk cup for cup; it carries the acidity the soda needs.
- Sweet milkOrdinary fresh whole milk. In period usage the word 'sweet' marks it as unsoured, in contrast to the sour milk in the same list.
- The fat measure is garbled'1/2 tablespoonfuls' cannot be right as printed; the plural, and the way '1' is elsewhere set as 'I' in this text, suggest a dropped digit, most likely one and a half tablespoons. Any small amount in that range will work.
- A very hot ovenNo temperature is given anywhere in the recipe; in modern terms this is usually read as around 450F. Corn bread wants a hard initial heat to set the crust before the crumb dries out, and the half hour the recipe specifies suits a pan of this size.
- Preheat the panGet the greased pan or skillet hot in the oven before the batter goes in. That is where the crisp bottom crust comes from.
- Beat quickly and wellThe soda begins working the moment it meets the sour milk. Mix only until combined and get it into the oven; a batter that sits loses its lift.
- Cornmeal grindPeriod meal was stone-ground and coarser than most supermarket cornmeal. Medium grind gives the texture the recipe expects; fine degerminated meal makes a softer, more cake-like bread.
- YieldOne 9-inch square pan or a 10-inch skillet, serving six to eight. Best eaten warm the day it is made.
Sour milk and saleratus or soda were the working leavening of the nineteenth-century American kitchen long before commercial baking powder was cheap and reliable: milk that had clabbered on the shelf was an asset rather than a loss, and a teaspoon of soda turned its acid into lift. This version, with sugar, wheat flour and eggs alongside the meal, is the northern style of corn bread, softer and sweeter than the plain meal-and-buttermilk breads of the South, and the recipe stretches one cup of flour across a whole pan of bread.