Home › Bread and Rolls › Corn and Rice Pone
Corn and Rice Pone
2 cups corn meal 5 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder 1 teaspoon salt 3 eggs 2 1/4 cups milk 4 tablespoons shortening 1 cup boiled rice Mix and sift dry ingredients; beat eggs, add milk and stir into dry mixture; stir in melted shortening and rice and pour into shallow greased pans. Bake in hot oven about 30 minutes.
A wet, custardy cornbread stretched with leftover rice — closer to spoonbread than to a firm cornbread. The batter should pour, not mound.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe says only "hot oven," which in period usage covers roughly 400-450F. Bake at 400-425F for about 30 minutes, until the top is browned and the centre springs back.
- Shallow pansTwo 8-inch square pans or one 9x13 gives the depth the recipe assumes. In anything deeper the middle stays soupy long after the edges have set.
- Baking powder quantityRoyal was a single-acting cream-of-tartar powder, and this pamphlet's five teaspoons is generous even by period standards. Modern double-acting powder is stronger; 3 to 4 teaspoons is enough for 2 cups of meal, and too much powder can leave a metallic aftertaste.
- Corn mealUse plain, unsweetened yellow or white corn meal, not a self-rising mix (which already contains leavening and salt) and not corn muffin mix.
- The ricePlain boiled long-grain rice, fully cooked and cooled or no more than lukewarm; hot rice risks curdling the egg-and-milk mixture. Break up any clumps with a fork before it goes in so the grains disperse through the batter.
- ShorteningMelted and cooled slightly before it meets the egg-and-milk mixture. Butter, lard or a neutral oil all work; 4 tablespoons is about 55 g.
- ServingFills a 9x13 pan and serves 8 to 10. Cut in squares and serve hot from the pan with butter; it is too moist to slice cleanly once cold, though it reheats well.
Pone comes from an Algonquian word for bread or something baked, recorded by English colonists in Virginia in the early 1600s and long since absorbed into Southern kitchen vocabulary. The version here is a later, richer descendant: eggs, milk and shortening turn the plain meal-and-water original into something spoonable, and a cup of boiled rice goes into the batter. Its appearance in a Royal Baking Powder booklet suggests the commercial logic of such pamphlets ather— one might reasonably infer that every recipe is built to demonstrate the product, which would explain why the leavening is measured in teaspoons rather than the older cook's pinch, and why five of them seemed a reasonable number.