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Golden Corn Cake
1 cup flour 1/4 cup sugar ¾ teaspoon salt 1 cup milk 1 egg 5 teaspoons baking powder 2 tablespoons melted butter Mix and sift dry ingredients; add milk, egg well beaten, and butter; bake in shallowed buttered pan in hot oven twenty minutes.
Corn Cake (sweetened with Molasses) 1 cup corn meal 3/4 cup flour 3½ teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon salt 1/4 cup molasses 3/4 cup milk 1 egg 1 tablespoon melted butter Mix and bake as Golden Corn Cake, adding molasses to milk.
A plain quick bread of the type Fannie Farmer's school turned out by the dozen for breakfast. The method is the standard muffin method, and the timing is short, so have the oven fully heated before anything is mixed.
- The hinge: mix and goOnce the milk and egg meet the dry ingredients, stir only until moistened and get the batter straight into the hot pan. Baking powder at this strength begins working immediately, and a batter left standing while the oven comes up will bake flat and tough.
- "Hot oven"The book gives no figure; a hot oven is conventionally read as somewhere around 400-425F. Twenty minutes at that heat in a shallow pan should give a well-browned surface and a centre that springs back.
- Shallow buttered panSomething on the order of an 8-inch square or a 9-inch round layer pan would suit. The point of "shallow" is a thin cake that cooks through in twenty minutes and is cut in squares at table; a deep pan will need longer and will steam rather than brown.
- Baking powderPowders of this period were single-acting rather than double-acting. Modern powder in these amounts can leave a faintly soapy or metallic edge, most noticeable in the molasses version; some cooks cut the quantity when working from recipes of this vintage.
- Corn mealUse plain yellow corn meal, not self-rising cornmeal mix and not masa. A medium grind gives the granular bite these cakes were expected to have; fine degerminated meal makes a softer, more cake-like crumb.
- Molasses versionAdd the molasses to the milk as directed so it disperses rather than sinking. Use unsulphured baking molasses; blackstrap is far more bitter than what was sold as molasses here and will dominate the corn.
- Yield and servingOne shallow pan, six to nine squares. Served hot from the pan with butter at breakfast or supper; it is best eaten the day it is baked.
Corn cake baked in a shallow pan, cut in squares and eaten hot with butter, was a New England breakfast staple long before chemical leavening; earlier versions relied on eggs, sour milk and saleratus, or were baked on a board before the fire. "Golden" here simply signals yellow meal rather than the white meal favoured in the South, and the pairing of a plain version with a molasses-sweetened one is characteristic of this book's habit of printing a base formula and then its variations. Molasses was still the everyday sweetener in much of New England, cheaper than refined sugar and a legacy of the West Indies trade that shaped Boston's kitchens; recipes like this one show it being used well into the era when granulated sugar had become common.