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Corn Bread
1 egg 3/4 cup sugar 2 tbsp. butter salt 1 heaping cup flour 1 even cup corn meal 2 heap. tsp. Royal bak. pow. 1 cup milk
— Mrs. Hiram B. Gibbs
This is a community-cookbook entry in its most abbreviated form: an ingredient list and nothing else, on the assumption that any woman reading it already knew what to do with a bowl of cornmeal. The proportions are sound; the method has to be supplied.
- The missing methodCream the butter and sugar with the egg, whisk the dry ingredients together separately, then combine alternately with the milk and stir only until the batter is uniform. Overmixing develops gluten in the wheat flour and gives a tough, tunnelled crumb.
- Oven and panNo temperature is given; the cook was expected to judge her own range. A modern equivalent would be a hot oven, in the region of 400-425F, for about 20 to 25 minutes in a greased 8-inch square pan or a 9-inch skillet. With a cup of milk to roughly two cups of dry ingredients the batter should be loose enough to pour.
- "Heaping" versus "even"The two words are used differently here: a heaping cup of flour is conventionally reckoned at something like 1 1/4 level cups, while the cornmeal is struck level at a full cup. Treating them the other way round would give a heavier, grittier bread.
- Royal baking powderRoyal was a cream-of-tartar (single-acting) powder that spent much of its lift as soon as the batter was wet. Modern double-acting powder releases its gas more slowly and in two stages; 2 level teaspoons is a safer measure here than 2 heaping, and the pan is still best got into a hot oven promptly.
- SaltGiven without quantity, as often happens in recipes of this kind. Half a teaspoon suits this volume of batter; if using salted butter, scale back slightly.
- Corn mealPeriod corn meal was more often a medium or coarse grind than today's fine degerminated meal. A stone-ground medium yellow meal gives the texture the recipe assumes; fine meal makes a cakier bread.
- SweetnessThree-quarters of a cup of sugar to one cup of meal marks this firmly as northern-style corn bread, closer to a cake than to the unsweetened Southern skillet bread. It is not an error and should not be cut unless you want a different dish.
- YieldOne 8-inch pan, nine squares. Best eaten warm the day it is baked; the sugar will keep it moist a little longer than a plain corn bread.
Cornmeal breads leavened with chemical powders rather than yeast or eggs alone spread rapidly through American home baking after the middle of the nineteenth century, and the brand name here reflects that shift: Royal Baking Powder was heavily advertised, and cooks often wrote the trade name into their recipes as though it were an ingredient distinct from baking powder in general. The split between sweet, flour-heavy Northern corn bread and the lean, sugarless Southern skillet version is well attested by this period. Philathea cook books were compiled by Philathea classes, the young women's Sunday-school Bible classes of the Baraca-Philathea movement, which began in Baptist churches in the 1890s and spread widely across Protestant congregations; the books were sold to raise money, and contributions typically carried the name of the woman who gave them, as Mrs. Hiram B. Gibbs's does here.