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Corn Bread
Scald the desired amount of white cornmeal and mix with it an egg and two tablespoonfuls of melted lard to each breakfast cupful of meal used and a little milk or cold water, with an equal quantity of hot water, a teaspoonful of baking-powder and a little salt, beat all together thoroughly; pour this batter into a hot, ungreased pan and bake for half an hour quickly.
A skeleton formula rather than a fixed recipe: Oscar scales everything to the amount of meal you decide to use. The instructions assume a cook who knows what cornbread batter should look like, so the two things worth pinning down are the liquid and the heat.
- Breakfast cupfulAn ordinary breakfast cup of the period held about 8 fl oz, near enough to a modern measuring cup. Read the recipe as: per cup of cornmeal, 1 egg, 2 tbsp melted fat, 1 tsp baking powder, salt.
- Scalding the mealPouring boiling water over cornmeal swells the starch and gives a moister, less gritty crumb — the same principle behind spoonbread and mush. Let the scalded meal cool to warm before the egg goes in, or it will set into curds.
- Baking powder and heatAdd the baking powder last, once the batter has cooled below scalding. Sitting in near-boiling batter it will spend most of its lift before the pan sees the oven.
- "Quickly" means hotA quick oven, roughly 400-425F. Half an hour at that heat suits an 8- or 9-inch pan; a thicker batter in a loaf tin will want longer and a skewer test.
- How much liquidThe original says only "a little milk or cold water, with an equal quantity of hot water." Start with about 1 cup total liquid per cup of meal and adjust to a batter that pours thickly but still pours — this is the one figure Oscar leaves genuinely open.
- LardTwo tablespoons of melted lard per cup of meal, as specified; lard gives good flavour and tenderness. Bacon fat is the closest substitute; melted butter works, though it browns faster.
- The ungreased panThe recipe calls for a hot, ungreased pan; heating the pan empty first is what gives the crisp bottom crust. With modern non-cast-iron pans, add a film of the melted lard to the hot pan before pouring, or it may stick.
- YieldTwo cups of meal, following the ratios above, fills a 9-inch skillet and serves six to eight.
White cornmeal is the tell here. Oscar Tschirky, maitre d'hotel of the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria, lent his name to the 1896 book, which draws on American home cooking as well as hotel practice, and this is a Southern-leaning cornbread: white meal rather than yellow, lard rather than butter, a hot pan rather than a greased one, and no sugar at all. Scalding the meal before mixing was a common nineteenth-century step, familiar from mush and hasty pudding. The teaspoon of baking powder fits the late century -- commercial baking powders were widely available by the 1890s, and Oscar simply takes the tin for granted.