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Southern Corn-Bread
1 cup sour milk
1½ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon soda dissolved in ½ cups corn-meal 1 teaspoon water
White of one egg beaten stiff
1 egg-yolk and added last
Mix in the order given and bake in muffin-tins or in a shallow pan in a moderate oven (350° F.) for fifteen minutes. To be real Southern corn-bread, this should be made of white corn-meal made from the whole grain.
The ingredient column in this printing has been scrambled by the typesetter, so read the quantities with care before you start. Everything else is straightforward, and the note about the meal is the part worth taking seriously.
- The two-column ingredient listThe ingredients were set in two columns and read across in a jumble: "½ teaspoon soda dissolved in 1 teaspoon water" belongs together, as does the stiffly beaten egg white added last. Batters of this period use about 1½ cups of meal to 1 cup of sour milk, which is the proportion to work from.
- Sour milkThis means naturally soured raw milk, thick and acidic, which reacts with the soda for lift. Cultured buttermilk is the standing substitute; a cup of milk with a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar left to stand ten minutes is thinner but will still trigger the soda.
- Soda, not baking powderThe half teaspoon of soda is doing all the leavening and depends entirely on the acid in the milk. If you use sweet milk the bread will be flat and will taste faintly soapy.
- Dissolving the sodaSlaking the soda in a teaspoon of water is not fussiness. Dry soda stirred into a stiff meal batter leaves bitter yellow specks; dissolved, it disperses evenly.
- The ovenThe book gives 350°F, which is unusually gentle for cornbread. Fifteen minutes at that heat suits muffin tins; a shallow pan of batter will want closer to 20 to 25 minutes, and a hotter oven around 425°F gives the crisp crust most people now expect.
- White whole-grain mealThe closing instruction is the real point of the recipe. Stone-ground white cornmeal with the germ intact tastes sweeter and coarser than degerminated yellow supermarket meal, and it goes rancid, so keep it in the freezer.
- Working quicklyFold in the beaten white last and get the batter into a hot pan at once. The soda begins releasing gas the moment it meets the sour milk, and a batter left standing bakes dense.
- Yield[7] Yield -- Depends on which reading of the meal quantity you take; on the 1½-cup reading, roughly eight to ten muffins, or one small shallow pan. Best eaten soon after baking.
Cornbread made with white meal, soured milk, soda and no sugar is the Southern side of a long-running regional divide; the Northern version leans on yellow meal, wheat flour and sweetening, and the distinction was being drawn in print by the later nineteenth century. The recipe is labelled "Southern" and appends the note about white whole-grain meal, which suggests the compilers did not expect the ingredient list alone to produce what a Southern cook meant by the word. The beaten egg white is a refinement of the era; plainer versions of the bread went into the pan with nothing but meal, salt, soda and sour milk.