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Corn Cake
1/4 cup sugar cup cornmeal 1 cup flour cup sugar 4 teaspoons baking powder 1 egg, well beaten 1 cup milk ½ teaspoon salt 2 tablespoons melted fat Mix and sift dry ingredients; add egg, well beaten, milk and the melted fat. Beat. Bake in a shallow, greased pan in a moderate oven 350°F. 20 minutes One cup sour milk may be used in place of sweet milk, using teaspoon soda and only 2 teaspoons baking powder.
A plain baking-powder corn bread of the standard half-cornmeal, half-flour type, baked flat rather than in a loaf. It comes together in one bowl and wants a hot pan and a short bake.
- Missing fractions in the ingredient listSeveral quantities in this printing have lost their fractions: the cornmeal, the sugar and the soda in the sour-milk variation all begin mid-measure. The cornmeal was most likely ½ or ¾ cup against the 1 cup of flour; 2 to 4 tablespoons is a usual figure for the sugar in this style, and ½ teaspoon soda is the usual amount with sour milk. Treat all three as reconstructions rather than fixed figures.
- Melted fatIn an American kitchen of this period this meant lard, bacon drippings or shortening. Melted butter or a neutral oil works; drippings give the more characteristic savoury edge.
- Sour milkThe sour milk of the period was raw milk left to clabber, not today's pasteurised milk, which spoils rather than sours cleanly. Buttermilk is the direct substitute, cup for cup, and the acid is what the soda is there to neutralise.
- Oven and pan350°F is given outright alongside "moderate oven". A shallow 8-inch square pan or a 9-inch round is the right size; grease it well and, for a crisper base, heat the greased pan in the oven for a few minutes before the batter goes in.
- Do not overbeat"Beat" here means only until the batter is evenly combined. Extended beating develops the wheat gluten and gives a tough, tunnelled crumb — mix just until no dry flour shows.
- Doneness and yieldTwenty minutes is realistic for a shallow pan; the top should spring back and a tester come out clean. Cuts into 9 squares, and it is meant to be eaten warm the day it is baked.
Corn cake, corn bread, johnnycake and hoecake all descend from the same practical fact: maize grew where wheat did not, and American households ground it coarse and baked it quick. If the proportion of meal to flour here is read as half-and-half — the line is damaged, and that reading is a guess — it would point to a comparatively late, refined version, made possible by cheap bolted wheat flour and by chemical leavening. Baking powder reached general commercial sale in the second half of the nineteenth century and by the 1920s and 1930s had largely displaced the older reliance on soda and sour milk, which survives in this recipe only as an alternative. Promotional household guides of this kind favoured exactly this sort of recipe: few ingredients, an actual oven temperature in degrees rather than "moderate", and a result no cook could reasonably fail at.