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Plain Corn Bread
One well-heaped pint corn meal, one pint sour or buttermilk, one egg, one tea-spoon soda, one of salt; bake in dripping or gem pans. If preferred, one heaping table-spoon of sugar may be added .
A bare-bones Southern corn bread: meal, soured milk, egg, soda, salt. The proportions still work, but the original assumes a stone-ground white meal, a screaming-hot greased pan, and a cook who knows what "bake" means without a number.
- Heat the pan before the batter goes inThis is the hinge. Grease a cast-iron skillet or muffin tin with bacon drippings or oil and put it in the oven until the fat shimmers, then pour in the batter so it sizzles on contact. That is what produces the crisp brown crust the recipe takes for granted; a cold pan gives a pale, soft-sided bread.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives no temperature. A hot oven of about 425-450F suits corn bread: figure 20-25 minutes in a skillet, 12-15 in muffin cups.
- Gem pans and dripping pansGem pans are muffin tins, usually heavy cast iron. A dripping pan is a shallow rectangular roasting pan; a 9-inch skillet or an 8-inch square pan is the modern equivalent.
- MeasuresA pint is 2 cups. "One well-heaped pint" of meal means roughly 2 1/4 to 2 1/2 cups, so expect a batter on the loose side rather than a stiff one. Spoon measures of this period were not necessarily level or of exactly modern size, though the recipe's separate call for a "heaping" spoon of sugar suggests the other spoons were not heaped.
- The corn mealUse fine or medium stone-ground meal, preferably white, and not a boxed "corn muffin mix," which already contains flour, sugar and leavening. Degerminated supermarket meal works but tastes flatter.
- Sour milk means clabbered milkCultured buttermilk is the direct substitute. If you use fresh milk soured with a tablespoon of vinegar or lemon juice, it will react with the soda but has less body; full-fat buttermilk gives a better crumb.
- SodaOne teaspoon to a pint of buttermilk is at the upper end of what the acid can neutralize. Measure it level and whisk it through the dry meal, or you will get soapy yellow-green streaks where it clumps.
- No fat in the batterThe recipe relies entirely on the greased hot pan, so the crumb is lean and dries out by the next day. It is meant to be eaten hot; a couple of tablespoons of melted drippings or butter stirred in, as some other recipes of the period do, will help it keep.
- YieldAbout one 9-inch round or 10-12 gems; serves six alongside a meal.
Plain corn bread of this kind — meal, soured milk, egg, soda, no wheat flour and no sugar unless you insist — is a Southern baseline. In much of the nineteenth-century South corn was the everyday grain and wheat the occasional luxury. The recipe's grudging "if preferred, one heaping table-spoon of sugar may be added" is a small period marker: sugar in corn bread was optional, a matter of taste rather than the norm it has become in supermarket mixes. The soda-and-sour-milk leavening reflects a kitchen where milk clabbered on its own and soda was the cheap reliable riser.