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South Carolina Corn Bread
1 1/2 quarts fine corn meal 2 1/2 quarts wheat flour or 2 1/2 quarts fine corn meal 1 1/2 quarts wheat flour 2 teaspoons salt 1 pint mashed sweet potatoes 1 cake yeast Mix one pint each of the corn meal and the flour and add warm water enough to form a stiff batter. Add the yeast cake, mixed with a small amount of water. Keep this sponge in a warm place until it becomes light. Scald the meal with boiling water and as soon as it is cool enough add it to the sponge, with the flour, potatoes and salt. The dough should be just thick enough to knead without danger of its sticking to the board. Experience will teach how much water to use to secure this end. Knead well, and put in a warm place to rise. When it is light, form into loaves, put into bread pans, and let it rise until its volume is doubled. Bake in a moderate oven.
It was a common, though not general, practice in New England to add cooked pumpkin to the other ingredients in making such bread as this, very much as sweet potato is used in the South. The sweet potato or pumpkin changes the flavor of the bread somewhat and apparently facilitates the rising of the dough, improves the texture of the bread, and tends to keep it moist. However, if sweet potato or pumpkin, either home cooked or canned, can not be conveniently obtained, good bread can be made without it.
A yeast-raised corn bread in the old sense — a kneaded loaf, not a quick bread — and it is scaled for a household or a boarding house. Read the ingredient list carefully before you start: it offers two alternative proportions of meal to flour, and the printing runs them together.
- The two optionsYou may use 1 1/2 quarts cornmeal with 2 1/2 quarts flour (the milder loaf), or reverse them for 2 1/2 quarts meal to 1 1/2 quarts flour (denser, more assertively corn-flavoured). Corn has no gluten, so the second version will give a heavier, more crumbly bread.
- Quantities in cupsA quart is 4 cups: the flour-forward version is roughly 6 cups meal to 10 cups flour, plus 2 cups mashed sweet potato. The recipe does not say how many loaves; a batch this size will fill roughly four or five pans, depending on their size. Halve or quarter it freely; the method is unaffected.
- One cake yeastA cake of compressed yeast of the period is usually reckoned as roughly equivalent to one 1/4-oz packet (about 2 1/4 teaspoons) of active dry or instant yeast, though period cakes varied in size and type. For a batch this large, two packets will move things along without hurting the flavour.
- The scalding is the pointPouring boiling water over the cornmeal gelatinises the starch and softens the gritty hull particles. Skipped, the meal stays sandy in the crumb and drinks water during the bake. Let it cool to lukewarm before it meets the yeast — hot mush will kill the sponge.
- Sponge and rise timesThe original says only "until it becomes light." Expect 1 to 2 hours for the sponge at room temperature, 1 1/2 to 2 hours for the bulk rise, and 45 minutes to an hour in the pans. Corn-heavy doughs rise sluggishly; judge by volume, not the clock.
- Hydration"Experience will teach how much water to use" is honest but unhelpful. The sweet potato and the scalded meal both carry moisture, so add water in small amounts at the end; the dough should be slightly tacky and just barely release from the board.
- Moderate ovenThe book says only 'a moderate oven', conventionally somewhere around 350-375F. Large loaves want 45 to 55 minutes; the bread is done at an internal temperature of 200 to 205F, which is more reliable than tapping a corn loaf for hollowness.
- Sweet potato or pumpkinUse plain mashed or canned purée, not the sweetened and spiced pie filling. Its function is real: the extra starch and sugar keep the crumb moist and give the yeast something easy to feed on, which is why the book credits it with helping the rise.
This belongs to a long American tradition of stretching wheat with corn — a habit born of the fact that maize grew where wheat did not, and that wheat flour was generally the costlier grain through much of the nineteenth century. Yeast-raised corn breads let a cook build a substantial loaf from a modest amount of flour. The compiler's aside about New England pumpkin is the more interesting note, since it records a regional parallel — a cooked starchy vegetable folded into bread dough to keep it moist and soft for days rather than hours.