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White Corn Bread
Mrs. E. S. Cheeseborough.
One pint of meal thoroughly scalded with hard-boiling water; butter the size of an egg, and one well-beaten egg; add milk to make it just thin enough to flow over the pan. Have the butter an inch thick, and then bake.
A four-ingredient Southern-style corn bread with no leavening and no salt, thickened by scalding the meal rather than by baking powder. It reads as a near relative of spoonbread, and it depends almost entirely on the scald.
- The hinge: scald properlyPour genuinely boiling water over the meal in a steady stream while stirring, and let it stand until it stops steaming heavily. This gelatinises the starch and is what gives the bread its tender, custardy crumb; lukewarm water will produce a gritty, sandy loaf.
- "Have the butter an inch thick"Almost certainly a printer's slip for batter: the butter has already been specified as "the size of an egg," so the instruction appears to concern the depth of batter in the pan rather than a second quantity of butter.
- MeasurementsOne pint of meal is two cups. Butter the size of an egg is about 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. The milk is unmeasured by design, since scalded meal absorbs variable amounts; add it after the mush has cooled enough not to scramble the egg, until the batter pours slowly.
- White meal specificallyWhite corn bread means white cornmeal, still the usual choice across much of the South and generally milder in flavour than yellow. Stone-ground meal suits this method; commercial degerminated meal may behave differently in the scald, so add the milk gradually and hold some back.
- SaltThe recipe gives none. About a teaspoon added with the scald would not be out of keeping with comparable recipes of the period.
- OvenUnspecified here; the recipe says only "bake." A hot oven, around 425F, suits a batter this wet; bake until set in the centre and browned at the edges, roughly 30 to 40 minutes at an inch deep.
- The panA well-buttered cast-iron skillet or an 8-inch square pan, preheated, gives the crisp bottom crust the recipe is angling for. Filling to one inch means this fills an 8-inch pan and serves six to eight.
- No rise to expectWith one egg and no soda or powder, this bakes dense and moist rather than cakey. Serve it hot from the pan; it firms up considerably as it cools.
The Home Cook Book (Chicago; first published 1874, with later reprintings through the 1870s) is generally counted among the earliest American compiled charity cookbooks, assembled from recipes signed by contributing ladies, and the attribution to Mrs. E. S. Cheeseborough is part of the point: these books traded on the reputation of named neighbours rather than a single author. The scalded-meal method here belongs to an older Southern and coastal tradition that runs through batter bread and spoonbread, in which boiling water does much of the work that chemical leavening does elsewhere; white cornmeal was, and remains, the usual Southern preference, while yellow meal was commoner in the North. That a Chicago collection carries a white corn bread suggests how freely such volumes gathered recipes from across regions.