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Rich Corn Cake
1 cup corn meal 1 cup white flour 1/2 teaspoon salt 7% cup milk ¼ cup melted butter 4 teaspoons baking powder 2 eggs ¼ cup sugar Mix and sift dry ingredients. Add milk, gradually, eggs well beaten, and butter. Bake in a buttered, shallow pan, in a hot oven.
A straightforward baking-powder cornbread with enough butter, sugar and egg to sit closer to cake than to plain johnnycake. A few of the quantities in this printing have lost their fractions, so read them as the proportions given below.
- The measurementsRead the butter and sugar as 1/4 cup each and the milk as 7/8 cup — one cup less two tablespoons. Those are the amounts that give a pourable but thick batter for this ratio of meal to flour.
- Hot ovenThe book gives no temperatures; "hot" is conventionally read today as somewhere around 400-425F. In a shallow 8-inch square or round pan it should take roughly 20-25 minutes at 400F; the top should be evenly browned and the centre spring back.
- Corn mealPeriod corn meal was stone-ground and coarser than most supermarket meal today. A medium or coarse yellow meal gives the intended texture; fine degerminated meal makes a softer, blander crumb.
- Mixing order mattersSift the dry ingredients together first so the baking powder is distributed, then add liquids and beaten eggs and stir only until combined. Overworking the flour toughens the cake.
- Melted butter lastAdd the melted butter at the end and off the heat of the milk, so it does not set the eggs or seize into lumps in a cold batter. Warm the milk slightly if the butter is congealing.
- Baking powderFour teaspoons for two cups of dry ingredients is generous by modern standards. Period powders were single-acting, and recipes of the day commonly called for more than a cook would use now; rather less modern double-acting powder will do the same work.
- Yield and servingMakes one shallow 8-inch pan, about nine squares. Best eaten warm within an hour of baking, as the corn meal stales quickly.
Fannie Farmer's book carries several corn cakes, and the word "rich" in the title is doing real work: butter, sugar and whole eggs were the markers of a cake fit for a company breakfast rather than everyday bread. New England had baked with corn meal since the colonial period, but by the 1890s wheat flour was cheap and reliable enough that cooks routinely cut the meal half and half with it, softening the grit and giving the crumb something to hold onto. Chemical leavening did the rest, replacing the saleratus-and-sour-milk method in most urban kitchens by the time this book appeared, which is why a batter like this can be mixed and put straight into a hot oven.