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Corn Bread
Take one cup of Indian meal; one cup of wheat flour, sifted with two teaspoons of baking powder; two eggs, one cup milk; two tablespoons of sugar; a pinch of salt and butter the size of an egg. Mix butter, sugar, and salt together. Add Indian meal and lastly the flour and milk alternately.
A plain two-cup cornbread of the sort that appears in nearly every American book of the period. The original omits both the eggs' place in the mixing and any oven direction, so both need supplying.
- Indian mealThis is cornmeal, and at this period it would generally have been stone-ground yellow or white meal, coarser and more perishable than modern degerminated supermarket meal. A medium-grind stone-ground cornmeal gives the closest texture; fine commercial meal makes a softer, cakier bread.
- Butter the size of an eggA standard nineteenth-century measure for about 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. It is creamed with the sugar and salt, so have it soft rather than melted.
- The missing eggsThe eggs are listed but never placed in the method. Beat them into the creamed butter and sugar before the meal goes in; adding them at the end with the milk will leave streaks.
- Alternating meal and liquidAdding the flour and milk alternately keeps the batter from breaking once the butter is in suspension. Stop mixing as soon as the last of the flour disappears; cornbread batter overworked with wheat flour in it turns tough.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, as the book assumes the cook knows. A hot oven, 400 to 425F, is right for this batter; lower and the crust never sets, higher and the outside colors before the center is done.
- Pan and timeThe quantity suits an 8-inch square pan or a 9-inch cast-iron skillet, well greased and preheated if using iron. Bake 25 to 30 minutes, until the top springs back and a skewer comes out clean.
- Baking powderTwo teaspoons raises two cups of dry ingredients here, one of meal and one of flour, which is close to modern proportions rather than heavy. Period powders varied in strength, so with a current double-acting powder you may prefer a scant two teaspoons.
- YieldEight to nine squares. Best eaten warm the day it is made.
"Indian meal" was the standing American name for maize meal from the colonial period well into the twentieth century, distinguishing it from the wheat flour that early settlers thought of as the default grain. The balance here -- equal parts cornmeal and wheat flour, with sugar, butter and eggs -- points to the sweeter, cakier Northern style rather than the unsweetened, nearly all-corn skillet breads associated with the South. The Butterick Publishing Company was better known for dress patterns and The Delineator. Chemical leavening made such quick breads possible on short notice; by the turn of the century commercial baking powder was widely available, though the older saleratus-and-sour-milk method persisted alongside it.