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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.
A hotel-scale batter bread built on scalded meal, written by a man who assumed you already knew how his other corn bread was baked. The missing pieces are the oven and the pan.
- The hinge: scald to suit the grindCoarse meal needs more thorough scalding and a slacker mix; fine meal will not bear much scalding or it sets up and caves in. The recipe holds the boiling water at a pint and scalds about two-thirds of the meal, so the adjustment is in how much meal you scald and how thin you mix it.
- The missing baking instruction"Bake as directed for the other kind" refers to a companion recipe not on this page, so no oven heat, time or pan is specified here. As a modern starting point, a hot oven of roughly 400-425F in a greased pan, checked from about 30 minutes, until the crust domes and browns.
- Weights to volumesOne pound of cornmeal is roughly 3 to 3 1/3 cups; 3 ounces of lard is about 6 tablespoons. A pint is 2 cups and 3/4 pint is 1 1/2 cups, so the total liquid is 3 1/2 cups plus the eggs.
- Basting-spoonfulsThe parenthetical measure is a kitchen approximation from a professional range, not a standard unit. Weigh the 3 ounces of fat and ignore the spoon count.
- Home-made baking powderPeriod cooks mixed their own, generally two parts cream of tartar to one part baking soda with a little cornstarch or flour to keep it dry. Commercial double-acting powder is stronger and slower; a scant teaspoon is still the right order of magnitude here, and it goes in last so it is not spent before the pan hits the oven.
- LardRendered lard is what the recipe calls for. Bacon drippings work; butter will brown faster, so watch the crust at the higher end of the oven range.
- White versus yellow mealThe author's contempt for yellow meal is largely a matter of hotel-trade taste. His remark about bitterness is real, though: cornmeal with the germ left in goes rancid, and stone-ground meal of either color should be kept cold and used fresh.
- YieldA pound of meal makes a full 9x13 pan or two 9-inch rounds, serving 10 to 12.
Scalding part of the meal with boiling water is a long-established technique in American corn cookery, inherited from the mush and hoecake tradition and still visible in spoonbread and the Southern batter breads: hot water gelatinizes the starch so a grain with no gluten will hold a crumb. This recipe comes out of hotel and restaurant work, where cooks bought whatever meal the supplier sent and had to make identical bread from it every morning, which is why so much of the text is about diagnosing failures rather than measuring ingredients. The preference for white meal was regional and trade opinion rather than fact, though the author's complaint about yellow meal turning musty reflects a genuine problem of the period, when unbolted meal retained the oily germ and spoiled quickly in a warm storeroom. The instruction to make your own baking powder was also ordinary then; commercial brands existed but were distrusted in some quarters.