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Corn Bread
1 1/2 cups corn meal. 1/2 cup flour. 1/2 tablespoon sugar. 1/2 teaspoon salt. 2 teaspoons baking powder 1/2 tablespoon butter 1¼ cups milk 1 egg Sift the dry ingredients together; add milk, beaten egg and butter . Pour into a shallow buttered tin and bake about half an hour.
A plain baking-powder corn bread of the type that filled American cookbooks around 1900, written in the shorthand of a cook who already knew the proportions.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, as was usual in recipes of this period. Corn bread of this kind wants a fairly hot oven, around 400-425F; at 350F the half hour is likely to leave it pale and underbaked in the middle.
- The quantity written 11/4This is one and a quarter cups of milk, not eleven quarters; the fraction has lost its spacing somewhere between the original page and this text.
- Meal and flourThe transcription has lost the opening lines listing the meal and flour that the method's "dry ingredients" must refer to. Corn breads of this type are generally built on roughly a cup of cornmeal with something under a cup of flour. Use a fine or medium meal; today's stone-ground coarse meal absorbs more liquid and gives a grittier crumb.
- Half a tablespoon of butterThat is about a quarter of an ounce, very lean by modern standards. Melt it and add it last with the milk and egg. If you want a richer, more tender crumb, two tablespoons is closer to current practice.
- "A shallow buttered tin"An 8-inch square pan or a 9-inch round is right for this volume; the batter should sit no more than an inch deep so it bakes through in the half hour. Butter the pan while the oven heats so the fat is hot when the batter goes in.
- MixingStir only until the dry ingredients are wetted. Beating a baking-powder batter smooth develops the flour and toughens the bread.
- Doneness and yieldTwenty-five to thirty minutes, until the top is set and lightly browned and a straw comes out clean. Makes eight to nine squares, best eaten warm the day it is baked.
Quick corn breads leavened with baking powder are a late-nineteenth-century development: cooks had been raising cornmeal batters with eggs, sour milk and saleratus for generations, but commercial baking powder, widely sold in American groceries from the 1860s and 1870s onward, made a single-step dry mix possible and cookbooks rewrote their corn breads accordingly. The entries are terse -- reference notes for someone who baked corn bread often, not instruction for a beginner. The lean butter and single egg mark it as an everyday bread rather than a cake-like modern version.