Home › Breakfast › Southern Corn Bread
Southern Corn Bread
2 cups corn meal 1 scant teaspoon soda 1 tablespoon Argo or Kings- 1 tablespoon Karo ford's Cornstarch 1 egg, well beaten 1 teaspoon salt 2 tablespoons Mazola 2 cups sour milk or buttermilk Combine ingredients in their order. Beat and pour into medium-sized pan oiled with Mazola, bake 30 minutes in hot oven, 375° F. May be made with sweet milk and 2 teaspoonsful baking powder instead of sour milk and soda.
A plain buttermilk cornbread of the Southern type, sweetened only by a spoonful of corn syrup. The branded ingredients are all products of one company, and all have ordinary equivalents.
- Mazola is corn oilAny neutral oil works in the same quantity. The two tablespoons in the batter and the film in the pan are both doing real work; do not skip the oiled pan.
- Karo is corn syrupOne tablespoon of light corn syrup, which browns the crust more than it sweetens the crumb. Honey or golden syrup substitutes without harm.
- Argo or Kingsford's cornstarchPlain cornstarch. It is there to soften the texture slightly against the coarse meal; a tablespoon of all-purpose flour is the usual modern stand-in, though it works differently.
- The cornmeal mattersSouthern cornbread of this date usually meant white meal, often stone-ground, softer than the yellow degerminated meal on most shelves now. Either will bake, but white meal gives a crumb closer to what the recipe expects.
- Scant teaspoon of sodaSlightly under a level teaspoon. Two cups of buttermilk carry enough acid to take up that much soda; more than a level spoonful leaves a soapy taste.
- Sour milk is not spoiled milkIn 1900s usage it meant naturally clabbered raw milk. Use cultured buttermilk, or two cups of milk soured with two tablespoons of vinegar or lemon juice and left ten minutes.
- The oven temperature375 ot so take it at face value: the recipe gives the number itself rather than leaving 'hot oven' to interpretation. If you want the crisp bottom crust a cast-iron skillet gives, heat the greased pan in the oven first and pour the batter in hot.
- Pan and yieldA "medium-sized pan" here is roughly an 8- or 9-inch square or a 9-inch skillet. It serves six to eight, and is best eaten within an hour of baking.
This is a promotional recipe: Argo and Kingsford's cornstarch, Karo syrup and Mazola oil were all products of the Corn Products Refining Company, and booklets of this kind were issued to teach American cooks new uses for them, corn oil in particular being a comparatively recent arrival in the home kitchen. The dish itself is much older than the brands. Cornbread leavened with soda and soured milk is often described as a characteristic Southern breakfast bread of the nineteenth century, unsweetened or barely sweetened, in contrast to the sugarier, flour-heavy Northern versions; the single tablespoon of Karo here may well owe more to the sponsor than to Southern taste. The alternate line at the end, offering baking powder and sweet milk, marks the period when commercial baking powder was displacing the older soda-and-clabber method in households that no longer kept their own milk.