Home › Our Susan's Opinion of a Kitchen › Splendid Corn Cake
Splendid Corn Cake
Mrs. W. A. Carson.
One pint of corn meal scalded with hot water; make as thin as mush, let it stand until quite cool; then add one teaspoon of salt, one tablespoon of melted butter, three eggs beaten light; make about as thick as pound cake and bake one hour in a slow oven.
This is a spoonbread in all but name: scalded cornmeal, eggs, no leavening, baked slowly until set. Two of its three measurements are given by comparison rather than volume, so the cook is expected to judge by eye.
- The hinge: scald, then coolPouring boiling water over the meal gelatinizes the starch and is what gives the finished cake its custardy body. It must cool to at least lukewarm before the eggs go in, or they will scramble in the batter.
- "One pint of corn meal"Two cups by volume. Use a plain stone-ground yellow or white meal, not a self-rising cornmeal mix and not degerminated fine cornmeal, which drinks less water.
- "As thin as mush"Roughly the consistency of loose porridge that just holds a trail from the spoon. It will take considerably more water than meal, added gradually until it reaches that point.
- "As thick as pound cake"A thick, droppable batter that falls heavily from the spoon rather than pouring. Three eggs alone may not loosen the cooled mush that far; the recipe does not say what else to add, so if you thin it, add liquid a spoonful at a time and stop when the batter slumps.
- "Beaten light"Beat the whole eggs until pale, foamy and roughly doubled in volume. With no soda or baking powder in the formula, the air in the eggs is the only lift the cake gets, so fold rather than stir them in.
- A slow ovenSomewhere in the region of 300-325F. One hour at that temperature suits a deep dish; the cake is done when the centre is just set and a knife comes out clean but moist.
- Pan and yieldA buttered 8-inch square pan or a 1.5-quart baking dish. Serves six as a side, and it is best eaten hot with butter, since it stiffens considerably as it cools.
The Home Cook Book (Chicago, 1874) was compiled from recipes contributed by named local women and sold in aid of the Home for the Friendless, which is why so many entries carry a signature like Mrs. W. A. Carson's. The book has plenty of precisely measured recipes, so the vagueness here is this contributor's rather than the book's: she was a cook writing for cooks who already knew what pound-cake batter looked like. The dish itself belongs to the family of scalded-meal corn breads, one that bears a family resemblance to Native American cornmeal mush and to Southern spoonbread, all of them relying on hot water to soften the coarse grain before baking. The absence of saleratus or baking powder is worth noting in a book of this date, when chemical leavens were widely available; here the eggs do all the work, which puts this recipe closer to the older, richer, custard-textured corn breads than to the quick square cornbread that later displaced them.