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Corn Bread (One pint corn meal sifted one)
One pint corn meal sifted, one pint flour, one pint sour milk, two eggs beaten light, one-half cup sugar, piece of butter size of an egg; add, the last thing, one tea-spoon soda in a little milk; add to the beaten egg the milk and meal alternately, then the butter and sugar. If sweet milk is used, add one tea-spoon cream tartar; bake twenty minutes in a hot oven. - Mrs. H. B. Sherman, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
A half-and-half cornbread — equal volumes of meal and wheat flour — leavened with soda and the acid in sour milk. The instructions are given in the compressed style of a contributed recipe, and the mixing order contradicts itself slightly; work from the notes below.
- Pints are volume, not weightOne pint equals two cups. So two cups cornmeal, two cups flour, two cups sour milk. This makes a large, generous batch.
- Butter the size of an eggRoughly 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. Melt it before adding, or it will not disperse through a batter this loose.
- Sour milk means cultured, not spoiledUse buttermilk. Nineteenth-century sour milk was raw milk clabbered by ambient lactic bacteria; today's pasteurised milk left on the counter simply goes bad. If you follow the alternative and use sweet (fresh) milk with a teaspoon of cream of tartar, that acid replaces the buttermilk's.
- The sodaOne teaspoon of soda for two cups of buttermilk is about the conventional proportion. Dissolve it in a little milk, as directed, and stir it in at the very end; the rise begins on contact.
- Sort out the mixing orderThe recipe says to add the soda last, then describes the assembly from the beginning. Beat the eggs, add milk and the combined meal and flour alternately, stir in the melted butter and sugar, then the dissolved soda, and get it into the pan immediately.
- A hot ovenThe recipe gives no temperature; a hot oven is roughly 400 to 425F. Grease a 9x13 pan or a large cast-iron skillet and heat it in the oven first so the batter sets on contact and the bottom crusts.
- Twenty minutesAccurate for a shallow pan or skillet at that heat. In a deeper dish give it 25 to 30 minutes and test the centre; the top browns well before the middle sets.
- YieldAbout a 9x13 pan, twelve to fifteen squares. With a half cup of sugar it sits closer to a Northern-style sweet cornbread than to a Southern skillet bread.
The Dixie Cook Book belongs to the great wave of subscription and compiled cookbooks that followed the Civil War, in which recipes were often printed with the contributor's name and town attached — which is how a cornbread credited to a Milwaukee cook comes to sit in a book called Dixie. The recipe itself is very much a Northern reading of the form: equal parts cornmeal and wheat flour, half a cup of sugar, eggs and butter, producing something cakelike, where the older Southern tradition leaned on cornmeal alone with little or no sweetening. The soda-and-sour-milk leavening is the older method, and the alternative given for sweet milk with cream of tartar amounts to mixing your own baking powder in the bowl; commercial baking powders were widely sold by the 1880s, though recipes of both kinds went on appearing side by side.