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Golden Corn Cake
3/4 cup yellow corn meal 1 1/4 cups flour 2 tablespoons sugar 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 tablespoon melted butter 1 cup milk 4 teaspoons baking powder Sift the dry ingredients together and mix with the milk. Add the melted butter. Turn into a buttered pan, and bake in a quick oven twenty to thirty minutes.
A plain quick bread from the eggless side of the wartime meatless kitchen — no egg, no buttermilk, just baking powder doing all the lifting. It works, but the batter behaves differently from the corn bread most people know.
- Get it into the oven fastWith four teaspoons of baking powder and no egg for structure, the rise begins the moment the milk hits the dry mix. Have the pan buttered and the oven fully preheated before you combine anything, and mix only until the flour disappears.
- "Quick oven"Roughly 400-425F in modern terms. At the upper end an 8-inch square pan may be done nearer twenty minutes than thirty, so start testing with a straw or skewer before the full time is up.
- The proportions are flour-ledOne and a quarter cups flour to three-quarters cup cornmeal makes a soft, cakey, pale-gold bread rather than a crumbly Southern-style one.
- Cornmeal grindYellow meal of the period was often stone-ground and coarser than modern supermarket degerminated meal. A medium stone-ground meal gives the texture the recipe assumes; fine meal will read more like a plain cake.
- Baking powderFour teaspoons in this quantity of flour is high by modern standards but not out of range for an eggless batter. Use fresh double-acting powder; anything stale will leave you with a flat, faintly bitter slab.
- Pan and yieldAn 8-inch square or a 9-inch round pan is right. It gives about nine squares, best eaten warm the day it is made — without egg or much fat it stales quickly.
- ButterOne tablespoon is very lean. Melt it and let it cool slightly before adding, so it disperses rather than seizing into flecks in the cold milk.
Corn bread leavened with baking powder rather than eggs and beaten air belongs to the era after chemical leavening became cheap and reliable in American kitchens. "Meatless" collections were tied to wartime campaigns to reduce consumption of meat, wheat and fats, and cornmeal was the standard substitute pressed on households — corn was domestic, abundant and not needed for export. That context explains the single tablespoon of butter and the absent egg here: both were commodities a thrifty cook was being asked to spare.