Bread, American
INGREDIENTS. -1 pint of white Indian meal, 1/2 pint of flour, 3 eggs (white and yolks beaten separately), rather more than a pint of milk, a large tablespoonful of butter, melted, but not hot; 1 large tablespoonful of white sugar, 1 teaspoonful of carbonate of soda dissolved in hot water, a teaspoonful of cream of tartar sifted in with the flour and added the last thing, 1 tablespoonful of salt. AVERAGE COST, 7d.
Mix the ingredients well together, then bake in a well-greased mould, steadily, for 3/4 hour. Turn it out and eat at once.
In cutting corn bread, hold the knife perpendicularly, so as to avoid crushing the spongy interior.
TIME. hour.
A spoonbread-adjacent corn bread, leavened with beaten egg whites as much as with soda and cream of tartar. Two things in the ingredient list need attention before you start: the salt, and the missing oven temperature.
- The salt is almost certainly wrongThe salt looks wrong -- a tablespoonful against a pint of meal is three times a teaspoonful and far more than the batter would palatably carry. It is likely a misprint for a teaspoonful, and that is the safer reading.
- Indian mealNineteenth-century shorthand for cornmeal. "White Indian meal" is white cornmeal, generally milder in flavour than yellow; either works, but white gives the pale, soft crumb the recipe assumes.
- Pints and the measuring problemBeeton's pint is the imperial 20 fl oz, so 1 pint of meal is about 2.5 US cups and the half pint of flour about 1.25 cups. These are volume measures of dry goods, not weights, so scoop and level rather than pack.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; Victorian ranges were judged by hand and habit rather than by dial. A modern equivalent for baking "steadily" is a moderate oven, roughly 350-375F; hotter and the outside sets before the eggy middle rises.
- Soda and cream of tartarTogether these amount to a home-mixed baking powder, though the recipe calls for equal teaspoonfuls rather than the greater proportion of acid usual in commercial powders. Get the batter into the tin and into the oven promptly once both are in.
- Beaten whitesThe whites are whipped separately for lift and should be folded in gently at the end, after the cream of tartar and flour. Stirring them through defeats the point and gives a dense loaf.
- The mouldA well-greased ring mould, deep cake tin or loaf tin, not a shallow skillet. Three-quarters of an hour suits a deep vessel; test with a skewer, as the batter is wet enough to look underdone at the centre while the edges brown.
- Yield and servingMakes one loaf; the recipe gives no number of servings. It is meant to be turned out and eaten hot, and the crumb is fragile, which is why the original directs that the knife be held perpendicularly in cutting.
Mrs Beeton's book collected dishes from across the English-speaking world, and "Bread, American" is a straightforward borrowing of the corn bread that was daily food across the United States, where maize rather than wheat was the cheap grain. The name "Indian meal" is older than the recipe: English settlers called maize "Indian corn" to distinguish it from corn in the British sense of wheat, and the meal ground from it kept the label well into the twentieth century. The heavy proportion of egg and milk here puts this closer to the softer Southern and mid-Atlantic batter breads than to the lean skillet cornbread of the frontier. The paired soda and cream of tartar are worth noting: commercial baking powder existed by then, but many cooks still specified the two components separately, trusting their own hand over the tin.