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Corn Bread
31/2 Cups Barley Flour 1 Cup Corn Meal 1 Yeast Cake 7/8 Cup Boiling Water 1 Egg 2 Tablespoons Syrup 2 Teaspoons Salt Directions:
Pour the boiling water over the corn meal and allow to cool.
Add yeast cake, broken and dissolved, in a few tablespoons of lukewarm water.
Then add the egg slightly beaten, the syrup and the salt. Beat well. Put in a greased bread pan, and when double its bulk bake in a moderate oven-15 minutes.
A wheatless yeast loaf of the sort that filled cookbooks during the First World War grain conservation drive. It behaves nothing like a modern quick cornbread, and two of its numbers need attention before you start.
- The liquid is shortSeven-eighths of a cup of water plus one egg will not hydrate 4 1/2 cups of flour and meal into anything you can beat. Expect to add water, and work toward a thick, spoonable batter-dough rather than a kneadable one.
- Yeast cakeA standard compressed yeast cake of the period was about 0.6 oz. Substitute one packet (2 1/4 teaspoons) of active dry yeast, softened in a few tablespoons of water at about 110F, as the recipe already directs for the cake.
- Barley flour behaves differentlyBarley has very little gluten, so the loaf will not build the elastic structure of a wheat bread. It rises modestly, stays close-grained and moist, and slices best after it has cooled completely.
- Cool the meal properlyLet the scalded cornmeal come down to about 110F before the yeast goes in; much hotter and the yeast will be damaged or killed. This takes longer than people expect -- half an hour or more in a wide bowl.
- Moderate oven350F. Grease a standard 9x5 loaf pan.
- Fifteen minutes is wrong for a loafA loaf of this size needs roughly 40 to 50 minutes at 350F, until the centre reads 200-205F.
- SyrupCorn syrup, cane syrup or light molasses all work. It is there partly to feed the yeast and partly for flavour.
- Rising"Double its bulk" in a cool kitchen with a low-gluten dough can take 1 1/2 to 2 hours. Judge by the dough, not the clock.
- YieldOne loaf, about 12 slices. Best eaten the day it is baked, or toasted thereafter.
Recipes like this one belong to the American food-conservation campaigns of 1917-18, when households were asked to keep wheat flour free for shipment to the Allies and to bake with barley, corn, oat, rice and potato flours instead. Community cookbooks and collections of the period are full of such substitution loaves, which is why a "corn bread" here turns out to be a yeast-raised barley loaf rather than the buttermilk-and-soda skillet bread the name suggests elsewhere. Barley was one of the substitutes promoted in these campaigns. The yeast cake, the scalded meal and the tablespoon or two of syrup are all standard machinery of the era's home baking, well before packaged dry yeast made the softening step optional.