Home › Quick Breads, Griddle Cakes and Waffles › Spoon Corn-Bread
Spoon Corn-Bread
2 cups water 1 cup white corn-meal 1 cup milk 1 tablespoon butter 1 teaspoon salt 2 eggs Mix the water and corn-meal and bring slowly to the boiling-point. Cook five minutes. Add the milk, butter, salt and well-beaten eggs. Beat thoroughly and bake in a well-greased pan for twenty-five minutes in a moderately hot oven (350 degrees F.). Serve from the same dish with a spoon.
A soft spoon bread built on a cooked cornmeal mush, thinner and more custardlike than any batter bread you can cut into squares. The recipe is unusually explicit about its oven, which saves guesswork.
- The hinge: cook the mush properlyBring the water and cornmeal to the boiling point and hold it there for the full five minutes; under-cooked meal can stay gritty and the finished bread may be watery. Stir continuously, as it thickens suddenly and needs to be worked smooth.
- Cool before the eggs go inAdd the milk and butter first and let the mush drop below scalding, then beat in the eggs. Eggs stirred into near-boiling mush will curdle into visible threads.
- White corn-mealWhite meal was standard in the American South and gives a paler, milder bread. Yellow meal works and tastes cornier. Use stone-ground if you can; the self-rising mixes sold under the same name will throw the proportions off.
- Oven350F as printed, which sits at the low end of the range period cookbooks usually give for a moderately hot oven. It suits a custardy interior.
- Pan and timingA greased 1 1/2-quart baking dish or 8-inch square pan. Twenty-five minutes gives a set edge and a barely firm center; if you use a deeper dish, allow 35 to 40 minutes and test that the middle no longer sloshes.
- No leaveningThere is none, and none is wanted. The eggs give a slight lift and the texture should be spoonable rather than risen.
- Yield and servingFour to six as a side dish. Serve straight from the baking dish while hot, with butter; it collapses and stiffens as it cools and does not reheat well.
Spoon bread is the softest member of the American cornbread family, close kin to the cornmeal mushes that preceded wheat bread in much of the country, and it is generally traced to the Upper South, where white cornmeal was the default. The name is literal: the bread is too loose to slice, so it is served with a spoon from the dish it baked in, as the last line instructs.