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Corn Bread (Mrs Wm H Low Two tablespoons)
Mrs. Wm. H. Low, Two tablespoons of sugar, one tablespoon butter, two eggs; stir all together, add one cup of sweet milk, three teaspoons of Cook's Friend baking powder, and threefourths of a cup corn meal; flour to make it quite stiff.
A short contributor's recipe of the kind that assumes the cook already knows what corn bread looks like going into the pan. The gaps — no salt, no oven temperature, no baking time, and flour "to make it quite stiff" — need filling in before you start.
- The hinge: how stiff is stiffEverything depends on that last line. With one cup of milk and two eggs, roughly 1 to 1 1/4 cups of flour gives a thick batter that drops from the spoon rather than pours. Taken literally to a stiff dough it bakes dense and dry; stop while it is still a heavy batter.
- Cook's Friend baking powderA Canadian brand, generally traced to the McLaren firm of Montreal, and still sold today. Any double-acting baking powder substitutes directly, but three teaspoons for one cup of milk is heavy by modern standards and can leave a metallic edge. Two teaspoons is enough for this quantity of batter.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh, unsoured whole milk, specified because sour milk and buttermilk were equally common in the pantry and would have called for soda instead of baking powder.
- SaltNone is listed, which was often left to the cook. Half a teaspoon makes the difference between bread and paste.
- The butterOne tablespoon, stirred together with the sugar and eggs as the recipe directs. Softened rather than melted butter will hold the mixture better; a single tablespoon is a lean amount and the bread will be best eaten warm.
- Oven and timeThe book gives neither. Bake at 400-425F; a shallow pan will take about 20-25 minutes, until the centre springs back.
- Pan and yieldAn 8-inch square pan or a 9-inch round skillet suits this quantity, giving eight to nine squares. It can also be baked in a muffin tin for about 15 minutes.
- ProportionsThree-quarters of a cup of cornmeal against a cup or more of wheat flour makes this a soft, cakey, faintly sweet northern-style bread rather than the coarse all-meal cornbread of the American South.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Toronto in 1877 by "ladies of Toronto and chief cities and towns in Canada" and sold in aid of the Hospital for Sick Children — commonly cited as the first Canadian fundraising cookbook, and built on the same model as the American church and charity compilations that swept both countries after the Civil War. Its recipes are signed, and a page like this one is essentially a neighbour's handwriting set in type: brief, unmeasured where the contributor thought measurement unnecessary, and confident that the reader owns a tin of the same baking powder she does. The naming of Cook's Friend by brand is itself of its moment. Chemical leavening was still new enough in the 1870s that cooks trusted particular makers rather than a generic product, and commercial powders were displacing the older saleratus-and-sour-milk method quickly enough that a recipe using fresh sweet milk still felt worth specifying.