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Apple Corn Bread
2 cups white corn meal 2 tablespoons sugar 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon cream of tartar 1 2/3 cups milk 3 tart apples pared and sliced 1 teaspoon soda Mix the dry ingredients, add milk, and beat thoroughly. Add the apples. Pour into a well-buttered shallow pan, and bake thirty minutes in hot oven.
A cornmeal batter bread with no eggs and no fat, leavened by a soda-and-cream-of-tartar pair rather than baking powder. It is dense and moist by design, closer to a spoonbread-adjacent cake than to a Southern skillet cornbread.
- Oven temperature"Hot oven" in books of this period means 400-425F. At that heat thirty minutes is about right for a shallow pan; the top should be set and lightly cracked, and a skewer in the centre should come out clean of wet batter.
- Pan sizeNo pan is specified. "Shallow" means about an inch deep of batter, so an 8-inch square or a 9-inch round works; a 9x13 gives a thinner, drier bread that will be done closer to 20 minutes.
- The leavening pairSoda plus cream of tartar is homemade baking powder, but the proportions here are lopsided — cream of tartar needs roughly twice the soda by volume to neutralise it. The tart apples and the milk supply the balance of the acid, so use genuinely sour cooking apples or the crumb may taste faintly soapy. If substituting modern baking powder for both, about two teaspoons is the nearest rough equivalent.
- Mix and bake at onceThere is no second rise to wait for. Cream of tartar reacts as soon as it is wet, so get the batter into a buttered pan and into the oven immediately after the apples go in.
- White corn mealWhite meal was the standard in much of the country and gives a milder, paler bread; yellow works much the same with a fuller corn flavour. Modern meal may hydrate differently from the old stone-ground sort, so if the batter looks thin, let it stand two minutes before judging it.
- The applesPared and sliced means thin — an eighth of an inch — or they will not soften in thirty minutes of baking. Three apples is a generous amount of fruit for this quantity of batter; expect a heavy, custardy result rather than a crumb you can slice cleanly.
- No fat in the batterButter the pan well and mean it. With nothing but milk for richness, this bread sticks and it goes dry by the next day; serve it warm, cut in squares, with butter.
- YieldEight to nine squares from an 8-inch pan, enough for a family breakfast or to stand in for pudding at supper.
Meatless cookery of this sort recalls the run of American cookbooks published around the First World War, when wheat and meat conservation was a matter of public campaign and the cornmeal recipe sections in such books swelled accordingly, though nothing here fixes the recipe's date. Corn was the domestic grain that did not need to be shipped abroad, and eggs and butter were expensive, which explains a bread built from meal, milk, and fruit alone. Pairing soda with cream of tartar was the older way of raising a quick bread − commercial baking powder had been on sale since the middle of the nineteenth century, but many household books kept printing the two-ingredient version. Apples in a cornbread served two purposes at once: they sweetened a batter given only two tablespoons of sugar, and their acid did some of the work of the cream of tartar.