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Clabber Bread
Beat four eggs separately; take two cups of clabber, one tablespoon butter (slightly heaped, and place where it will soften), a teaspoon each soda and salt; mix with flour to a stiff batter; grease pan, pour in batter, and let rise an hour before baking. Excellent.
— Mrs. B.'S Corn Bread
One quart sour milk, three eggs, two table-spoons lard or butter (or half and half), one table-spoon sugar, a pinch of salt, handful of wheat flour, and enough corn meal (sifted) to make a good batter; add one heaping tea-spoon soda, stir thoroughly, and bake in long dripping pan.
Two batters are run together here: a clabber quick bread and a sour-milk cornbread contributed by Mrs. B. Both assume a cook who knows what a good batter looks like and an ingredient most kitchens no longer keep.
- ClabberClabber is raw milk left at room temperature until it sets into a soft, tangy curd, roughly the consistency of loose yogurt. Pasteurized milk will not clabber properly, it spoils instead, so use cultured buttermilk, plain whole-milk yogurt, or kefir thinned to a pourable curd.
- Beat four eggs separatelyMost likely yolks and whites in separate bowls, the whites whipped and added last, though the phrase could also mean each egg beaten on its own. With only a teaspoon of soda for two cups of clabber, whipped whites would do real work.
- The hour's riseSoda and acid react immediately, so a batter left standing an hour will lose much of its lift; why the original calls for the wait is not clear from the text. If you substitute buttermilk or yogurt, bake at once.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A batter bread of this kind suits a hot oven, in the region of 425F, in a well-greased pan; 30 to 40 minutes depending on depth.
- Mrs. B.'s quantitiesOne quart sour milk is 4 cups, a handful of wheat flour is about half a cup, and "enough corn meal to make a good batter" will run 3 to 4 cups of fine stone-ground meal. Add the meal gradually; it hydrates and stiffens as it sits.
- Soda in the cornbreadOne heaping teaspoon of soda for a full quart of sour milk is light by current practice, which runs nearer half a teaspoon per cup of soured milk. Expect a dense, tangy bread rather than a fluffy one.
- Long dripping panA dripping pan is the shallow rectangular pan that sat under a roast, near enough to a modern half-sheet or 9x13. Grease it heavily; this batter has no sugar to speak of and will stick.
- YieldThe clabber bread fills one 8- or 9-inch pan and serves six. Mrs. B.'s cornbread, on a quart of milk, fills the long dripping pan -- a half-sheet or 9x13 -- and will feed ten to twelve.
Clabber was the unavoidable byproduct of keeping a cow before refrigeration: milk that had not been drunk or churned soured on its own, and a thrifty kitchen turned it into bread rather than throwing it out. Paired with saleratus or soda, its acid gave Southern cooks a leavening that needed no yeast, no sponge and no waiting overnight, which is why sour-milk breads crowd this chapter. The Dixie Cook Book, generally traced to the compiler Estelle Woods Wilcox and her earlier Buckeye Cookery, gathered its recipes from named contributors, and the abrupt appearance of "Mrs. B.'S Corn Bread" mid-paragraph is a typesetting collision of two such donations rather than one recipe in two parts.