Corn Bread
2 cups yellow cornmeal 4 level teaspoons Calumet Baking Powder 3 eggs 2 tablespoons melted butter 2 cups flour 1 pint of milk 1 teaspoon salt 1/2 cup boiling water Pour boiling water over cornmeal, and let it cool; sift flour together with baking powder and salt. Beat yolks of eggs until they are light, then add them to cornmeal and then add milk, flour, and melted butter; beat to a smooth batter and beat whites of eggs to a stiff froth. Add the latter to your mixture, stirring it in quickly. Pour all into a shallow, well greased pan and bake in a hot oven 25 minutes.
A Calumet company pamphlet recipe, and the ingredient list has been mangled in setting — read the method first, then reconcile the quantities before you start.
- The missing cornmealThe method calls for cornmeal scalded with boiling water, but no quantity appears in the list. Comparable recipes of the period use about 1 cup of cornmeal to 1 1/2 to 2 cups of flour; the original as printed does not tell you, so treat the amount as an editorial judgement rather than a conversion.
- FlourThe printed page was checked, and the flour called for is the 2 cups our text now gives. That makes a fairly stiff, cake-like corn bread; scale back by half a cup if you want a batter that pours more freely.
- Hot oven"A hot oven" in this period is usually taken as somewhere around 400-450F. At that heat 25 minutes in a shallow pan is plausible; a deeper pan will need longer and should be checked with a skewer at the centre.
- A pint of milkTwo cups. Combined with three eggs this is a wet, custardy batter by modern standards, closer to a spoonbread than to a crumbly Southern skillet cornbread.
- Scald and coolPouring boiling water over the meal gelatinises the starch and softens the grit — the step that keeps this bread tender. It must be cooled before the yolks go in or you will scramble them.
- Baking powder quantityFour level teaspoons is generous by modern standards; 3 teaspoons is ample for 1 1/2 to 2 cups of flour, and too much leaves a metallic edge.
- Folding the whites"Stirring it in quickly" means folding, not beating. The whites are the only reason this batter rises above its weight; deflate them and you get a dense, damp slab.
- Pan and yieldThe recipe specifies only a shallow, well-greased pan; something in the region of a 9x13 inch tin, or a heated cast-iron skillet, will take this quantity. Best eaten warm the day it is baked.
Reliable Recipes was published by the Calumet Baking Powder Company of Chicago, one of the many American baking-powder advertising cookbooks that circulated from around the turn of the century. Calumet was sold as a "double-acting" powder — one release of gas when the batter is mixed, another in the oven — and the books existed to persuade cooks that a can of powder could replace the older reliance on yeast, sour milk and saleratus. That commercial purpose shows in the recipe: the baking powder is named as a brand and listed first, ahead of the eggs, and the quantity is on the liberal side. The dish itself belongs broadly to the Northern tradition of cornbread, where wheat flour, whole milk and beaten eggs soften the meal into something nearer a cake, in contrast to the plainer meal-water-and-fat breads of the South.