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Cornmeal Pan Bread
Mix and sift two pounds cornmeal flour and a quarter pound wheat flour in a dishpan, gradually pour one and one-eighth quarts boiling water over and briskly stir with spatula to a tepid point. Briskly beat two fresh eggs in a china vessel with fork for two minutes, add one and a half teaspoons good honey, two teaspoons salt, a tablespoon melted butter (or good melted lard instead), teaspoon lemon essence and three gills lukewarm ferment, then briskly mix all well together for three minutes. Gradually add mixture to flour, sharply stirring while adding, and continue to sharply mix with spatula for thirty minutes. Have a high-edged baking pan greased all around with a tablespoon melted lard, transfer batter to pan, cover with a piece of paper and place in a temperature of 80 degrees for two hours to rise. Remove paper, then set pan in oven to bake until a nice light brown colour on top, which will take about one hour, turning pan two or three times meanwhile. Remove, cut bread into pieces of any desired shape and serve with butter on a hot dish in folded napkin. Left-over bread can be heated up in oven and served again, as it will keep in good condition for two or three days.
This is a yeast-risen corn batter bread, not the quick soda-leavened cornbread most American cooks expect. The hinge is the first step: the boiling water must scald the meal thoroughly, which gelatinizes the starch and is the only thing that gives a nearly all-corn loaf any structure.
- Scald first, cool secondPour the boiling water over the meal and stir until the mush is genuinely tepid, near body temperature. Adding the egg-and-ferment mixture to hot mush will kill the yeast and scramble the eggs.
- Cornmeal flourThis most likely indicates a finely ground meal rather than a coarse one. A fine or medium yellow meal works; a coarse grits-grind meal will drink the water differently and stay gritty.
- Gills and quartsA gill is half a cup, so three gills is 1 1/2 cups. One and one-eighth quarts is 4 1/2 cups of boiling water for the 2 lb of meal.
- Lukewarm fermentThis is a liquid yeast starter, barm or a thin sponge, not packaged yeast. The original gives no strength for it, so any conversion is a guess; a 1 1/2-cup flour-and-water sponge raised with about a teaspoon of active dry yeast the night before is the nearest equivalent, and the substitution will change both flavor and rise time.
- Lemon essencePeriod lemon essence was generally an alcoholic tincture of lemon oil. How its strength compared with modern lemon extract is not documented, so start with about half a teaspoon of lemon extract, or the grated zest of one lemon, unless you want the loaf frankly scented.
- Thirty minutes of stirringCorn contributes no gluten and the quarter pound of wheat flour very little, so the long beating is mostly about aeration and evening out the mush. A few minutes in a stand mixer with the paddle should do much the same.
- Eighty degreesThat is 80F, an ordinary warm-kitchen proof, not an oven setting. Two hours is a guide; go by the batter looking domed and bubbled.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A modern oven around 350F is a reasonable match for the stated hour in a deep pan; the repeated turning of the pan would have evened out the hot and cool spots of a range of the period and is generally unnecessary in a modern oven.
- YieldTwo and a quarter pounds of dry meal and flour makes a very large loaf, roughly a full 9x13 pan, serving twelve or more. Halve it for a household.
Yeast-raised corn breads like this one belong to an older tradition than the baking-powder cornbread that dominates American kitchens: before chemical leavens were cheap and reliable, a batter of scalded meal set to rise with barm or a leftover sponge was one way to get a light loaf out of maize. Related yeast-raised corn breads survive in Portuguese broa and in the corn-and-rye breads of parts of Europe, and scalded meal also underlies spoonbread. The recipe's vagueness about the "ferment" suggests readers were expected to have a starter of their own, though the strength of such ferments varied and commercial yeast was widely available by this period.