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Corn Rolls
One pint of corn meal, two table-spoons sugar, one tea-spoon. salt, one pint boiling milk; stir all together and let stand till cool.
Add three eggs well beaten, and bake in gempans. -Mrs. Capt. J. P. Rea, Minneapolis, Minn.
A scalded-meal batter leavened by nothing but beaten eggs, which makes the handling of the batter more important than anything else in the list.
- The hinge: scald, then coolPouring boiling milk over the meal gelatinizes the starch and gives these rolls their custardy interior. The mixture must be cool before the eggs go in, or they will curdle into threads and the batter will not rise.
- A pint of mealOld recipes measure cornmeal by volume: a pint is 2 cups, roughly 10 oz. Use plain fine or medium yellow or white cornmeal, not self-rising mix and not coarse polenta grits.
- A pint of boiling milk2 cups, brought to the boil as the recipe specifies. Whole milk gives the best texture; the batter should be thick but pourable once cool, and can be loosened with a spoonful or two more milk.
- Gem pansCast-iron gem pans are the ancestor of the muffin tin. A standard 12-cup muffin pan works, but grease it generously and heat it in the oven first so the batter sets on contact and the rolls release.
- OvenThe original gives none. Bake at 425F for 20 to 25 minutes, until well browned and firm; a slack oven leaves the centers wet, since there is no chemical leavening to lift them.
- No leavening is not an errorDo not add baking powder out of habit. The three eggs, beaten well, are the whole rising agent, and the result is meant to be moist and close-grained rather than cakey.
- Yield and servingAbout 12 rolls. They are at their best within minutes of leaving the oven, split and buttered; they toughen as they cool and do not reheat well.
The Dixie Cook Book belongs to the great wave of American compiled cookbooks of the 1880s, in which a publisher gathered signed contributions from housekeepers across the country -- hence a Minneapolis captain's wife appearing in a book with Dixie on the cover. The recipe itself uses a familiar technique: scalding cornmeal with a hot liquid, then binding it with eggs, is the method behind spoonbread and batter bread, and this batter is baked in small iron cups -- gem pans, the cast-iron muffin pans sold widely from the 1870s onward. The absence of any chemical leavening dates the recipe as much as the vessel does; egg-risen breads persisted alongside saleratus and the newer baking powders well into the century's end.