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Corn Bread (Take one quart buttermilk)
Take one quart buttermilk, and one heaping pint corn meal, one tea-spoon soda, one of salt, one table-spoon sugar and three eggs; have the stove very hot, and do not bake in too deep a pan. The batter seems too thin, but bakes very nicely. - Mrs. J. H. Shearer, Marysville, Ohio.
A thin, eggy buttermilk batter with no wheat flour and no fat in the mix, so it behaves more like a spoonbread-adjacent skillet bread than a modern cake-style corn bread. Two things carry it: a genuinely hot oven and a shallow, well-greased pan.
- Take the thin batter at its wordFour cups of buttermilk to roughly 2 1/2 cups of meal gives a batter close to heavy cream. Resist the urge to thicken it; the eggs and the steam do the work, and added meal will produce something dense and dry.
- "Stove very hot"No temperature is given; in modern terms this is usually read as somewhere around 425-450F. Preheat the pan in the oven while it comes up to temperature so the batter sets on contact.
- MeasuresA quart is 4 cups. A heaping pint of cornmeal is about 2 1/2 cups, or roughly 11-12 oz by weight; "heaping" is imprecise by nature, so weigh if you want consistency between bakes.
- The mealMany nineteenth-century receipts assume stone-ground meal, whole and coarser than modern degerminated meal; white was the usual Southern choice, though yellow was common in the Midwest. Stone-ground may drink more liquid, and supermarket fine meal may leave the batter looser than intended.
- Soda and buttermilkOne teaspoon of soda per quart of buttermilk is on the light side by modern practice, which usually runs 1/2 teaspoon per cup. Mix and get it into the hot oven promptly, since the lift begins the moment the soda meets the acid.
- Pan and fat"Do not bake in too deep a pan" is the hinge. There is no fat in the batter, so grease a 12-inch cast-iron skillet or a 9x13 pan generously and heavily, and keep the batter under about an inch deep or the center stays wet while the edges overbake.
- Yield and timingEnough for 8 to 10 servings. Expect roughly 25-35 minutes in a hot oven; it is done when the top is browned and a knife in the center comes out clean rather than custardy.
Corn bread built on buttermilk, soda and eggs, with no wheat flour at all, is the older Southern pattern: cornmeal was the everyday grain across much of the South well into the twentieth century, while wheat flour was a purchased good. That the contributor writes from Marysville, Ohio is characteristic of The Dixie Cook Book, which despite its title drew heavily on Northern material and Northern contributors, its "Dixie" framing as much a marketing posture as a geography. Mrs. Shearer's closing reassurance -- that the batter "seems too thin, but bakes very nicely" -- is the kind of note common in community cookbooks, where contributors wrote to head off an objection they expected another cook to raise.