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Southern Egg Bread
Three pints of soft ground white meal, 1 pint of buttermilk, 2 eggs, 1 scant teacupful of lard, 1 teaspoonful of soda, ½ of a teaspoonful of salt and some sweet milk. Put the buttermilk in a bowl, add the soda, and when it foams up stir in the meal, the beaten eggs, salt and sufficient milk or cream to make a rather thin batter; last of all stir in the melted shortening. Beat hard for a moment, pour into hissing hot, well-greased pans and bake quickly in a hot oven. This is an old time Georgia recipe.
A plain buttermilk cornbread from the era when cornmeal was measured by the pint and the pan went into the oven before the batter did. Two things carry it: a genuinely hot pan and a batter looser than you would expect.
- Hissing hot pans firstGrease the pan and heat it in the oven until the fat shimmers and the batter sizzles on contact. This is what gives the crust its shell; batter poured into a cold pan gives a pale, soft-sided bread.
- "Soft ground white meal"Finely ground white cornmeal, water-ground if you can get it, rather than the coarse yellow meal sold for polenta. The softer, finer meal favoured in the South tends to give a more tender crumb.
- MeasuresThree pints of meal is 6 cups; a pint of buttermilk is 2 cups. A teacupful in period American cookbooks is unstandardised, usually reckoned somewhere between about 1/2 and 3/4 cup, so a scant teacup of lard is perhaps 4 to 6 fluid ounces melted.
- Soda and buttermilkA level teaspoon of soda against 2 cups of buttermilk is about right; the foaming the recipe describes is the reaction you are watching for. Mix and bake promptly, since the lift is spent within a few minutes.
- "A hot oven"425 to 450F. In shallow pans the bread will be done in 20 to 25 minutes, less in a cast-iron skillet with a thin layer of batter.
- A rather thin batterThinner than a modern cornbread batter early pourable. Add the sweet milk gradually until it flows off the spoon in a ribbon; too stiff a batter with this much meal bakes dry.
- FatLard gives the flavour the recipe expects. Bacon drippings work; melted butter is fine but browns faster in the hot pan. Stir the melted fat in last, as written.
- YieldSix cups of meal makes a large batch wo 10-inch skillets or a 9x13 pan, serving 10 to 12. Halve it comfortably for a household of four.
History: "Egg bread" was used in the South for a richer cornbread and, in wetter versions, for something close to spoonbread, the eggs and buttermilk setting it apart from the plain meal-and-water pones and hoecakes. The call for soft white meal reflects the fact that much Southern field corn was a soft dent variety, ground fine and often water-ground at a local mill, and complaints about the coarser meal sold elsewhere do turn up in period writing. Recipes of this kind, tagged "an old time Georgia recipe," are common in turn-of-the-century collections: cornmeal was cheap, buttermilk was a by-product of home churning, and the bread could be mixed and baked quickly.