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Virginia Corn Bread
Dissolve 1 tablespoonful of butter in 3½ pints of boiling milk; stir in 1 quart of corn-meal; when cool add ½ pint of wheat flour, 1 teaspoonful of sugar, 1 teaspoonful of salt and 2 eggs well beaten; mix well together and bake in two cakes. The tins must be well buttered.
A scalded-meal corn bread: the meal is cooked briefly in hot milk before the eggs and flour go in, which gives a softer, moister crumb than a straight batter bread. The original gives no oven temperature and its milk quantity has been mangled in printing.
- The milk quantityThe printed page gives 3½ pints of boiling milk to a quart of meal, which is what our text now reads. That makes a thick mush that will still take the eggs and flour. Add the meal gradually and stop when it is fully hydrated but not soupy.
- Scald, then coolThe meal must be stirred into genuinely boiling milk so the starch swells, and the mixture must cool to warm before the eggs go in, or they will scramble. This step is the hinge of the recipe; skip it and you have an ordinary corn bread batter.
- CornmealSouthern corn bread of the period commonly used fine white water-ground meal, which tends to absorb more liquid than modern degerminated yellow meal. If you use supermarket yellow cornmeal, expect a slightly stiffer mush and hold back some of the milk.
- No leaveningThere is no baking powder or saleratus here. The lift comes entirely from the beaten eggs and steam, so the finished bread is dense and custardy near the center, closer to spoonbread than to a modern quick bread. Beat the eggs well and fold rather than stir them in.
- OvenThe original assumes the cook knows her range. Bake at 400F for roughly 35 to 45 minutes, until the tops are browned and a knife in the center comes out clean.
- "Two cakes" and tinsTwo 8-inch round or square pans, buttered generously as instructed.
- ServingBest hot from the oven with butter. Scalded-meal breads firm up considerably as they cool and are dry the next day; reheat covered rather than eating cold.
Scalding cornmeal in hot milk or water is a long-standing practice in American corn cookery, inherited from the mush and hasty pudding of colonial kitchens, and it survives in the whole family of Southern batter breads, spoonbreads and "mush breads." Attaching a state name to a corn bread was standard in nineteenth-century cookbooks, where Virginia is often said to have signalled the richer, egg-and-milk style, as against the plain water-and-meal pone of everyday cooking. A half pint of flour to a quart of meal was a small indulgence in an otherwise economical loaf.