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Poor-Man's Bread
One pint of buttermilk or sour milk, one level tea-spoon soda, a pinch of salt, and flour enough to make as stiff as soda-biscuit dough; cut into three pieces, handle as little as possible, roll an inch thick, place in dripping-pan, bake twenty or thirty minutes in a hot oven, and, when done, wrap in a bread cloth. Eat while warm, breaking open like a biscuit. Each cake will be about the size of a pie.- Mrs. D. B.
A three-ingredient soda bread that leans entirely on the reaction between sour milk and soda. It comes together in minutes, so have the oven hot before you mix.
- The hinge: mix and bake fastThe soda begins releasing gas the moment it meets the acid in the buttermilk, and that lift is not renewable. Mix only until the dough holds together, shape it, and get it into a preheated oven.
- "A hot oven"The book gives no temperatures; the phrase is usually read today as somewhere around 400-450F. At that heat the twenty to thirty minutes given is plausible for inch-thick cakes; they are done when the underside is well browned and the cake sounds hollow tapped.
- Sour milk versus buttermilkThe original assumes milk that has clabbered naturally in a warm kitchen. Modern pasteurized milk spoils rather than sours safely, so use cultured buttermilk. One pint is two cups.
- Flour quantityNo amount is given because it depended on the flour in the barrel. Expect a good deal of flour for a pint of buttermilk -- on the order of five to six cups or more of all-purpose -- to reach a stiff biscuit dough; add it gradually and stop as soon as the dough is no longer sticky.
- One level teaspoon of sodaAbout the usual proportion for two cups of buttermilk, and no more: excess soda leaves a soapy, yellowish crumb. Do not round the spoon.
- "Handle as little as possible"Southern kitchens generally worked with softer wheat flour than modern all-purpose, which has more gluten and toughens faster. Pat the dough out rather than kneading or re-rolling.
- Dripping-panThe rectangular pan that sat under roasting meat, roughly a modern rimmed baking sheet. The three cakes should sit apart so their sides brown.
- The bread clothWrapping the hot cakes traps steam and softens the crust, which is the point here. Serve within the hour; this bread is poor eating cold and worse the next day.
- YieldThree round cakes, each 'about the size of a pie' as the recipe puts it, so roughly eight to nine inches across.
The name is literal: this is bread for a household with no yeast, no eggs, no shortening and no sugar to spare, made from the leftover milk of butter-making and a spoonful of soda. Chemical leavening sold under the name saleratus -- potassium bicarbonate at first, sodium bicarbonate later in the century -- put quick breads within reach of cooks who could not keep a yeast sponge alive between bakings, and soda-raised biscuit and cake breads are especially prominent in Southern collections. The Dixie Cook-Book carried contributed recipes, which is why the attribution here is a set of initials rather than a name; the flour quantity is left to the cook, who would have been expected to know what soda-biscuit dough felt like in the hand.