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Egg Bread
Take an equal amount each of rice and hominy, mash them well together and add the yolks of some eggs well beaten with a little flour and some sweet milk, with a lump of butter. Whisk the whites of the eggs well and, just before forming into loaves, add them. Bake until done in a quick oven.
This is a Southern-style egg bread of the spoonbread family, written in the old shorthand that assumes the cook knows the proportions. Nothing here is difficult, but you will have to supply the amounts.
- Hominy means cooked hominyIn American cookbooks of this era "hominy" on its own usually means whole or coarsely broken hulled corn already boiled soft, or what we would now call cooked grits. Use it warm and soft, not dried, and drain it well or the batter will be slack.
- Sweet milkPlain fresh whole milk, as opposed to sour milk or buttermilk, which were the other options in a period kitchen. No substitution needed.
- A quick ovenGenerally read as somewhere around 400 to 425F. At that heat a shallow pan of this batter will likely take something like 30 to 40 minutes, a thicker shape longer; go by colour and set rather than the clock, since the original gives neither quantities nor pan.
- Working proportionsFor a family-sized bread, about 1 cup each cooked rice and cooked hominy, 4 eggs separated, 3 tablespoons flour, 1 cup milk and 2 tablespoons melted butter. Season with a teaspoon of salt, which the original omits entirely.
- The whites are the leaveningThere is no baking powder here. Beat the whites to soft peaks and fold them in at the last moment, then get the bread into the hot oven immediately, or it will bake dense and heavy.
- "Forming into loaves" is optimistic"Forming into loaves" -- the original clearly expected a mixture stiff enough to shape, which means less milk than a pourable batter. If your mixture comes out loose, do not fight it: bake it in a buttered baking dish, a shallow pan or muffin tins and treat it as spoonbread rather than a kneaded loaf.
- Judging donenessThe top should be well browned and the centre set with only the faintest wobble. A skewer comes out clean but slightly moist. It falls somewhat as it cools, which is normal for this style of bread.
- ServingAbout six servings as a side. Serve hot, straight from the dish, with butter; egg bread does not keep or reheat well.
Egg bread, batter bread and spoonbread all belong to the same Southern family of soft corn breads leavened chiefly with beaten egg, a style usually traced back to the porridge-like corn dishes of the earlier South. The distinguishing move in this version is the combination of rice and hominy; rice-and-corn breads of this kind are often associated with the Carolina and Georgia low country, where rice was a staple crop and boiled rice was worked into breads and griddle cakes. If the collection is Oscar Tschirky's, its presence there would be consistent with a New York hotel kitchen of the period drawing on regional American home cooking as well as the French repertoire.