No. 3422

Corn Bread

Pain de Mais

Put four ounces of butter into a tin basin; work it to a cream with four ounces of sugar, add a pinch of salt and four eggs singly, also a gill of milk; now sift in one pound of corn flour and half a pound of ordinary flour into which has been previously added two coffeespoonfuls of baking-powder, and add another gill of milk to finish. Butter some corn-bread molds, fill them three-quarters full with the preparation, lay them on baking-sheets and set them in a hot oven to bake for twelve to fifteen minutes; unmold them as quickly as they are done and removed.

← No. 3421 Sweet Rolls, Crescents and Muffins Bakery & Breads No. 3423 Rye Bread, Boston Brown Bread and Graham Bre →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer's corn bread is a rich, cake-like batter meant for individual iron molds rather than a single pan. The measurements are by weight, which makes it easier to reproduce than most recipes of its date, but two of the terms need translating.

GillA gill is half a cup, so the two additions come to one cup of milk in all. Add the second gill gradually — the batter should be thick but pourable, and stone-ground meal will drink more liquid than degerminated.
Corn flourIn Ranhofer's usage this is ground corn for baking, i.e. cornmeal, not the fine white cornstarch that "corn flour" means in Britain today. Use a fine or medium yellow cornmeal; one pound is roughly 3 to 3 1/2 cups.
Ordinary flourPlain all-purpose flour. Half a pound is about 1 3/4 cups, and it is what keeps the loaf from crumbling apart at a 2:1 ratio against the meal.
CoffeespoonfulsA coffeespoon is usually reckoned smaller than a teaspoon, though the French cuillerée à café that Ranhofer was likely rendering is a teaspoon; figure somewhere between half and a full teaspoon each, so roughly 1 to 2 teaspoons of baking powder for a pound and a half of dry ingredients. That is light by modern standards; period baking powder was single-acting, and the four eggs will contribute some lift of their own. Around 1 tablespoon of modern double-acting powder gives a rise closer to what a present-day cook expects.
A hot oven425 to 450F. The short 12-to-15-minute bake depends on it; at 350F these will dry out before they colour.
Corn-bread moldsMost likely the cast-iron corn-stick pans still sold today, though the recipe does not describe their shape. Ranhofer has them buttered and filled cold, but if you preheat them instead the batter should hiss as it goes in, which is what gives the crisp shell. A 12-cup muffin tin works, with a minute or two more.
UnmoldingThe instruction to turn them out the moment they leave the oven is not incidental. Left in hot iron, the crust steams and softens within a few minutes.
YieldAbout 18 to 20 corn sticks, or a dozen and a half muffins. The batter does not keep well once mixed; bake it promptly.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) was Charles Ranhofer's summing-up of some thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its French headings sit oddly over a good deal of plainly American cooking — here, pain de mais for what any household book of the period would have called corn bread. The recipe shows what a restaurant kitchen did with a homely form: four eggs, four ounces of butter and four ounces of sugar make this closer to a cake than to the eggless, sugarless skillet breads of the South, and it belongs to the sweeter Northern line of corn bread that was already well established by the 1890s. The molds Ranhofer calls for were American cast-iron ware, and pans on much the same pattern are still manufactured — one of the few pieces of equipment in the book a modern cook can buy new.