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The Best Cornbread I Know
1 cup flour 3 teaspoons baking powder 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 cup cornmeal 1 tablespoon sugar 1 well beaten egg 1 cup milk 1/2 lb. bacon, cut fine Sift dry ingredients. Beat egg, add milk and combine with dry ingredients. Sprinkle the bacon over the top, after pouring batter in thin layer in greased pan. Bake about 15 minutes in hot oven.
A thin, skillet-style cornbread with bacon baked into the top rather than stirred through the batter. The batter carries no fat of its own, so the bacon drippings are doing all of the enriching as it bakes.
- Oven temperature"Hot oven" in books of this period is usually taken as somewhere around 400-450F. At the lower end a thin layer should bake through in the stated 15 minutes; at 450F start checking at 12.
- Pan size and depthThe instruction to pour a "thin layer" is the whole point of the timing. This quantity of batter wants a 9x13 pan or a quarter sheet, giving a depth of roughly half an inch. In an 8-inch square it will be twice as deep and need 25 minutes or more, by which time the bacon will be past crisp.
- The bacon"Cut fine" means small dice, not strips. Modern supermarket bacon is generally wetter and more thickly sliced than the bacon of this period; rendering it briefly in a pan first and scattering it on drained gives reliably crisp results and keeps a slick of grease off the surface. Whole slices laid on top are unlikely to cook through in 15 minutes.
- No fat in the batterThere is no butter, lard or oil in the mix, which leaves the crumb dry by current standards. If you want a softer bread, two tablespoons of melted butter or bacon fat beaten into the milk will not hurt the structure.
- Cornmeal grindA medium or fine white or yellow meal is the likelier intention here, rather than a coarse stone-ground grit. A coarse grind in a batter this thin may stay gritty over so short a bake; let it stand 10 minutes before pouring if that is all you have.
- Baking powderThree teaspoons leaven two cups of dry ingredients here, flour and cornmeal together, which works out at about a teaspoon and a half per cup and is close to modern practice. If you find a metallic edge, two and a half teaspoons of current double-acting powder still gives plenty of lift.
- YieldAbout eight generous squares from a 9x13 pan. Best eaten within an hour of baking; with no fat in the crumb it stales quickly.