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Gluten and Corn Bread
2 1/2 cups yellow or white corn meal 3/4 cup gluten, rye or wheat flour, preference being in order named 1/2 yeast cake or 1 cake dissolved in 1/4 cup lukewarm water 2 tablespoons butter 3 teaspoons salt 1 tablespoon sugar 1 1/2 cups boiling water Pour the corn meal into a dish of boiling water. It is not sufficient merely to pour the boiling water over the meal in a cold dish. If yellow meal is used, heat it a little in addition to pouring it into the boiling water, or mix meal and water and heat in a double boiler. When cool mix with the other ingredients and knead thoroughly. Place in a baking dish, and bake when risen sufficiently.
A yeast-raised corn bread rather than a quick bread, and the whole thing turns on how the meal is treated at the start. The original gives no oven temperature, no rising time and no pan size, so those have to be supplied.
- Scald the meal properlyThe instruction to pour the meal into boiling water, not water over meal, is the hinge of the recipe. Cornmeal has to be gelatinized to absorb water and soften; a cold bowl drops the temperature too fast and leaves you with gritty bread. The recipe offers the double boiler as an alternative treatment for yellow meal and gives no time; five to ten minutes of gentle cooking is a reliable route.
- Let it cool before the yeast"When cool" means below about 110F. Mush holds heat far longer than it looks, and mixing yeast into a hot porridge kills it outright. Test with a finger or a thermometer.
- Yeast cakeA cake of compressed yeast is generally reckoned at about 0.6 oz, roughly equivalent to 2 1/4 teaspoons of active dry or instant yeast, though cake sizes varied. Half a cake is then a little over 1 teaspoon, which will work but needs a longer rise.
- Gluten flour"Gluten flour" was a commercial product of the period sold largely for diabetic diets: wheat flour with much of the starch washed out. The nearest modern equivalent is bread flour with a tablespoon of vital wheat gluten worked in. Plain bread flour alone is perfectly serviceable, and rye is the second choice the recipe itself names.
- KneadingWith only 3/4 cup of wheat flour against 2 1/2 cups of meal, this is not a stretchy dough. Expect a heavy, sticky paste that you work rather than knead in the usual sense; it will not pass a windowpane test and should not be floured into submission.
- RisingLow-gluten doughs rise slowly and modestly. Allow 1 to 1 1/2 hours in a warm room, and judge by a visible increase of about half again in bulk rather than a doubling.
- Oven and timeThe recipe gives no temperature; bake at 350F for 45 to 60 minutes in a greased loaf pan, until the crust is firm and the centre reads about 200F. Corn breads brown early, so go by internal temperature rather than colour.
- Yield and saltMakes one modest loaf, about 8 by 4 inches. Three teaspoons of salt is on the assertive side for this quantity of flour and meal; two is closer to modern taste if the bread is going with a salty dish.
Meatless Cookery has been placed in the American home-front cooking literature of the First World War years, when the Food Administration was urging households toward meatless and wheatless days and toward corn, rye and oats as substitutes for wheat flour bound for Europe. Whether that campaign explains a bread like this is less certain: a loaf that is four parts cornmeal to one part wheat, raised with yeast so it keeps and slices like ordinary bread instead of crumbling like a griddle-baked pone. The gluten flour named first among the three options points at a different current in the same period. Gluten flour was a manufactured dietetic product, associated particularly with diabetic regimens before insulin; its appearance at the head of the list suggests a book written with an eye to readers who were already buying specialty flours. Scalding cornmeal before baking with it is far older than either concern, and is often linked in American cookery to the mush and hasty-pudding traditions.