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Corn Bread
1 tablespoonful sugar 1 tablespoonful melted beef dripping or chicken fat 1 egg, well beaten 1 cup thick sour milk teaspoonful salt Dissolve soda in hot water, put with sour milk.
Sift and mix dry materials; add egg, milk, and shortening. Bake in muffin-tins half an hour. A little sour cream, if at hand, may be substituted for some of milk. In that case omit shortening.
Cottage Cheese No. 1 Cook one pint of thick sour milk in double boiler over simmering water until it begins to whey.
Strain through fine napkin, squeeze out the whey, and add three teaspoonfuls of cream, a little salt, and white pepper. Make into small balls. This amount makes four or five.
Cottage Cheese No. 2 To three pints of thick sour milk add one pint of boiling or very hot water. Let stand half an hour, pour off water, and put curd in small bag to drain (a small salt-bag may be used). Add salt, a little soft butter, and cream if at hand.
Eggless Cookies (Plain) ½ cup butter (chicken fat or beef dripping may be substituted) 1 cup sugar 1 cup thick sour milk teaspoonful soda ½ teaspoonful cinnamon ½ teaspoonful clove
The page has come through the scanner with its ingredient list mangled — the cornmeal, flour, and soda quantities that belong at the top of the corn bread are missing, and three further recipes run on behind it without a break. What follows sorts out what is usable.
- The list is incompleteThe method calls for soda dissolved in hot water and for sifted dry materials, but no cornmeal, flour, or soda quantity survives in this text. Nothing here lets you reconstruct those amounts honestly; treat the page as a record of proportions for the wet ingredients (1 cup sour milk, 1 egg, 1 tablespoon each sugar and fat) and take the dry measures from a current sour-milk corn bread.
- "Thick sour milk"This means raw milk left to clabber until it sets — thick, tangy, and mildly acidic, not merely spoiled milk. Cultured buttermilk is the usual modern substitute and reacts with soda in the same way. Pasteurized milk soured with lemon juice or vinegar is thinner in body.
- Soda in hot waterDissolving the soda before it meets the milk distributes it evenly and avoids the bitter yellow flecks you get from dry lumps. Once the two are combined the batter is working, so get it into the tins and into the oven without delay.
- Beef dripping and chicken fatBoth were kitchen by-products in a book of this kind and both give corn bread a savory edge. Bacon fat, lard, or melted butter all stand in at the same measure.
- Oven and timeNo temperature is given; the book assumes a range whose heat the cook judged herself, and it uses no oven term at all. Modern corn muffins are usually baked at 400F for 18 to 22 minutes; check at 18 rather than trusting the half hour.
- YieldWith the dry measures missing, the yield cannot be fixed from the text. A batter built on one cup of milk and one egg would fill roughly 8 to 12 standard muffin cups, or an 8-inch square pan.
- The sour cream variationSubstituting sour cream for some of the milk and omitting the added fat works because the cream carries its own butterfat, exactly as the recipe directs. Commercial sour cream may be thicker than the batter wants; thin it with milk if it will not pour.
- The two cottage cheesesBoth depend on raw milk clabbering into a clean, sound curd. Pasteurized milk does not clabber reliably; it spoils. No. 1 cooks the milk in a double boiler over simmering water, but names no temperature and no time; No. 2 never heats the milk itself at all beyond the pint of hot water poured in. Use a current fresh-cheese recipe rather than these.
- Eggless cookies, cut off mid-listThe final recipe breaks off after the spices, with no flour and no baking instruction. It is legible as evidence of what thrift baking looked like, not as something to follow.
Sour milk and soda were the everyday leavening of the American kitchen through the nineteenth century, and they persisted in thrift cookery long after baking powder had taken over elsewhere, because milk that had turned was a resource rather than a loss. That is why corn bread sits here alongside two cottage cheeses and a batch of eggless cookies: the organizing idea is not the dish but the soured milk that would otherwise be thrown out. Thrift and conservation cookbooks of this kind were common in the United States in the early twentieth century, though nothing in the text as it survives dates this one. The instruction to substitute beef dripping or chicken fat for butter belongs to the same logic — rendered fat was kept rather than discarded, and a recipe that could take it was worth printing.