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Corn Bread
1 cup corn meal 1 cup flour 4 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder 3 tablespoons sugar 1 teaspoon salt 1 1/2 cups milk 2 tablespoons shortening 1 egg Mix and sift dry ingredients; add milk, melted shortening and beaten egg; beat well and pour into greased shallow pan. Bake in hot oven about 25 minutes.
A straightforward Northern-style corn bread from a baking powder company's promotional book, sweetened and half wheat flour. The instructions are complete; only the oven and pan need translating.
- "Hot oven"In period usage roughly 400-425F; 425F works well here. At that heat the batter sets fast and rises before the crumb dries out; 25 minutes suits a shallow pan, and a tester in the center should come out clean.
- Shallow panAn 8-inch square or 9-inch round pan gives a layer about an inch thick, which is what the timing assumes. A deeper pan will need longer and will come out heavier. Cast iron, greased and preheated, gives the best crust.
- ShorteningIn this period the word means a fat used for shortening: lard, a vegetable shortening such as Crisco, or often butter. Melted butter or a neutral oil both work.
- Corn mealFine or medium yellow or white meal, not the coarse grits-grade stuff and not self-rising meal, which carries its own leavening and salt on top of what the recipe already calls for. Degerminated supermarket meal behaves as the recipe expects; stone-ground meal absorbs more liquid and gives a coarser crumb.
- Baking powderFour teaspoons for two cups of dry ingredients is generous by modern standards, which run nearer 1 to 1.5 teaspoons per cup. Measure it level -- over-leavened corn bread rises, cracks and then collapses in the middle.
- Mixing"Beat well" is the one instruction to take loosely. Corn bread with this much wheat flour toughens if beaten hard; mix only until the batter is uniform and get it into the hot pan promptly.
- YieldNine squares from an 8-inch pan. Best eaten warm the day it is baked; it stales quickly because of the low fat.
The New Royal Cook Book was published by the Royal Baking Powder Company, one of a long line of pamphlets and hardbacks issued by leavening manufacturers, in which every recipe naturally calls for the brand by name. That commercial purpose shapes the corn bread itself: a chemically leavened, egg-and-milk batter of the kind that displaced older cornmeal breads raised with sour milk and saleratus, or with no leavening at all. The sugar and the equal measure of wheat flour mark it as a Northern recipe — cooks in the South generally kept corn bread unsweetened and used little or no wheat, a division often said to persist. Corn meal itself was the older American staple, and recipes like this represent the point at which it became one ingredient among several rather than the whole of the bread.