Corn Bread
2 tablespoonfuls melted Crisco 1 cupful flour 1/2 cupful sugar Mix cornmeal with flour, sugar, 1 cupful sour cream 2 eggs ½ teaspoonful baking soda 1/2 teaspoonful salt salt, Crisco, eggs well beaten, and soda mixed with cream. Mix well and turn into Criscoed tin and bake in moderate oven thirty minutes.
Sufficient for one small pan of corn bread. 1¼ cupfuls flour
A soda-risen cornbread from Procter & Gamble's Crisco promotional booklet, leavened entirely by baking soda reacting with sour cream. The ingredient list as printed does not give a quantity for the cornmeal, so treat the proportions below as guidance rather than gospel.
- The missing cornmealThe method calls for cornmeal but no amount appears in the list, and a second flour figure (1/4 cupful) sits loose at the end. Period cornbreads vary widely in the cornmeal-to-flour ratio; for a batter of this size, about 1 cupful cornmeal is a reasonable working assumption rather than a documented one.
- Moderate ovenConventionally read as somewhere around 350F, though the book gives no temperatures. Thirty minutes in a small (about 8-inch) pan should give a set, lightly browned crumb; test with a skewer at 25 minutes.
- CriscoAny solid vegetable shortening, melted, or an equal amount of neutral oil. Melted butter works and tastes better, though it will brown the crust faster.
- "Criscoed tin"Simply a greased pan. An 8-inch square tin or a 9-inch skillet suits this quantity.
- Sour creamIn 1913 this often meant thin cream soured naturally at room temperature, thinner and sharper than modern cultured sour cream. Today's thick sour cream makes a heavier batter; loosening it with a few tablespoons of buttermilk brings it closer to the original consistency.
- Soda and acidThe 1 1/2 teaspoonfuls of soda depend on the acidity of the cream for lift and for a clean taste. Mix the soda into the cream as directed, then get the batter into the oven promptly, as the reaction begins at once.
- SugarHalf a cupful is sweet by Southern standards. Reduce to 2 tablespoonfuls for a savoury cornbread to serve with beans or greens.
- YieldThe recipe says only "one small pan of corn bread".
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written to teach American cooks what to do with a product that had no precedent: cottonseed oil hydrogenated into a white, shelf-stable solid, sold as a replacement for both lard and butter in baking. Many of the recipes exist to demonstrate a substitution, which is why the batter here is bound with melted shortening rather than the drippings or butter an older cornbread would have used, and why the pan is "Criscoed" rather than greased. The cornbread itself is much older than the fat: soda-and-soured-cream leavening was standard in American home baking through the nineteenth century, before commercial baking powder became cheap and reliable.