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Milk Cornmeal Bread, Montgomery
Place two pounds sifted cornmeal and a quarter pound sifted wheat flour in a dishpan, sprinkle over one and one-eighth quarts boiling milk and briskly stir with the spatula until tepid. Beat in a bowl for two minutes three fresh eggs with a fork, add two teaspoons salt, three teaspoons fine sugar, a teaspoon orange-flower water, tablespoon good melted butter and three gills lukewarm ferment. Whisk the whole well together for three minutes, add to flour and sharply mix with spatula for thirty minutes. By that time it will be of a smooth, consistent dough. Thoroughly grease a high-edged roasting pan with a tablespoon good melted lard, transfer dough into pan, cover with a piece of paper and lay in a temperature of 80 degrees for two hours to rise, remove covering and set to bake for about an hour, or until a nice golden colour. Avoid opening oven door for twenty minutes, after that turn pan around two or three times, remove, cut into any desired shape and serve on hot dish with a folded napkin.
A large yeast-raised cornbread built on scalded meal, closer to an old-style batter loaf than to modern quick cornbread. Two things decide whether it works: the scald and the starter.
- Scald the meal firstThe boiling milk poured over the cornmeal gelatinizes the starch, which is what keeps a coarse-meal loaf from being gritty and dry. Stir until the mass is only tepid before the eggs and yeast go in, or the heat will kill the ferment.
- "Three gills lukewarm ferment"A gill is half a cup, so this is 1 1/2 cups of active liquid leaven — barm from brewing, or a wet sourdough starter. If substituting commercial yeast you are replacing both liquid and leavening, and the total hydration has to be adjusted; the original gives no dry-yeast equivalent.
- Quantities in modern termsTwo pounds of cornmeal is roughly 6 cups, a quarter pound of wheat flour a scant cup, and one and one-eighth quarts of milk 4 1/2 cups. This is a very big loaf — a full roasting pan, perhaps 12 to 16 servings.
- Orange-flower waterStill sold in Middle Eastern groceries and baking aisles. A teaspoon in this volume is a background note, not a floral perfume; leave it out if you like, it is not structural.
- Thirty minutes of mixingWith a spatula and a stiff meal dough this was hard labour. A stand mixer with the paddle does the same work in 8 to 10 minutes; the aim is a smooth, consistent batter-dough, not gluten development, since there is very little wheat here.
- The 80-degree riseThat is Fahrenheit — a warm kitchen corner, around 27C. Two hours is a guide; with a wild starter judge by the dough doming and loosening rather than by the clock.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A loaf of this depth wants a moderate oven, 350F, for the full hour, tented with foil if the top colours before the centre sets. An instant-read thermometer should show about 200F in the middle.
- Turning the panThe instruction to leave the door shut for twenty minutes and then rotate the pan two or three times most likely compensates for uneven heat in a range of the period. In a modern oven one turn at the halfway mark is enough.
Filippini's International Cook Book catalogues a great many dishes under place names and personal names, and this one carries Montgomery — possibly the Alabama capital, though the book's tags are not always geographic and the connection is not stated. Yeast-raised cornbreads like this belong to an older tradition than the baking-powder cornbread that now dominates American kitchens: before chemical leaveners were cheap and reliable, a wet barm or sourdough starter often did the lifting, and scalding the meal was one common way to make coarse meal behave in a loaf. The orange-flower water and the folded napkin read more like Filippini's restaurant hand than anything regional; he had spent many years in New York's Delmonico's kitchens. The 80-degree proofing corner is a reminder that a turn-of-the-century cook worked with the temperatures her kitchen happened to offer.