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Common Corn Bread

1 pound of white corn meal. 3 ounces of melted lard (2 large basting-spoonfuls). 1 pint of boiling water. 3/4 pint of cold water or milk. 2 eggs. 1 teaspoonful of salt. 1 small teaspoonful of home-made baking powder. Scald about two-thirds of the meal with the boiling water, leaving the rest at the side of the pan to be stirred in with the other ingredients. Beat the powder in last, and bake as directed for the other kind. Now if corn meal was always alike there would be no more to be said. But here is where the genius for making corn bread comes in. Both of these sorts should have a smooth crust rounded over like a good pound cake. The particular point is the scalding of the meal, and that varies according as the meal is fine or coarse ground. I have known some few neophytes who saw into the deepest depths of this profound matter at the first glance, but others, seemingly as intelligent, would slip up every time a different grade of meal came in hand. Sometimes the crust would rise and crack open forty ways, like a map of the Rocky Mountains, and the bread would fall to pieces. That was because the meal was coarse and not sufficiently scalded, or not mixed thin enough Sometimes the bread would rise at first, but then cave in, all but the edges, like a pond gone dry, and cut like mush. That was because the meal was fine ground, and would not bear scalding much. White meal coarsely ground is the best. Some few people think they like yellow meal, but as surely as it is put to the test in hotel cookery the demand both for bread and mush falls off, and both are soon entirely neglected And yellow meal, for some reason, soon acquires a bitter, musty taste, which may have as much to do with the small liking there is for corn meal preparations as any other reason.