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Southern Spoon Bread
3 tablespoonfuls melted Crisco 1 quart milk 2 cupfuls cornmeal 1 teaspoonful salt 3 eggs Heat milk to boiling point, then stir in meal and salt; add Crisco and cook five minutes. Cool mixture, add yolks of eggs well beaten, then beat whites of eggs to stiff froth and fold in. Pour batter into Criscoed twoquart pan and bake in moderate oven forty minutes. Serve while hot, using a spoon with which to serve it. This is especially good served with roast pork.
Sufficient for one large pan of bread. 3 eggs
A straightforward egg-risen cornmeal pudding, and one of the few recipes in this book where the Crisco is incidental rather than the point. The whole dish hinges on the folded whites, so everything before them exists to get the mush cool enough not to kill them.
- Cool the mush properlyThe batter must be at least lukewarm to the touch before the yolks go in, and closer to room temperature before the whites. Hot cornmeal mush will scramble the yolks and deflate the whites on contact, and the bread will bake dense.
- Moderate ovenThe book gives no temperatures; 'moderate' was conventionally taken as somewhere in the region of 350-375F. Forty minutes in a 2-quart pan should give a set edge and a barely trembling centre; a skewer near the middle should come out with moist crumb, not liquid batter.
- CriscoVegetable shortening, sold under the same name today though reformulated to remove partially hydrogenated oil. Melted butter is the usual substitution here and improves the flavour; the quantity is small enough that the choice matters more to taste than to texture.
- "Criscoed" panSimply greased. Grease it generously and heat it in the oven while you finish the batter if you want a browned crust on the sides.
- The cornmealSouthern spoon bread was generally made with fine, soft white stone-ground meal, though the recipe specifies only 'cornmeal'. Modern coarse yellow meal absorbs differently and gives a grittier result; fine-ground white meal is closest to the likely original. Add it to the boiling milk in a slow stream while whisking, or it will lump.
- Five minutes of cookingStir constantly over low heat. Cornmeal and milk scorch quickly, and a scorched batch cannot be rescued by anything that follows.
- No chemical leaveningThe eggs are the only lift, which is why the whites must be beaten to stiff peaks and folded rather than stirred. Many later spoon bread recipes add a teaspoon of baking powder as insurance.
- Yield and timingThe recipe claims only 'one large pan of bread'; a 2-quart pan would plausibly serve six to eight as a side dish. Spoon bread sinks soon after leaving the oven, so bring the pan to the table and serve it out directly, as the recipe says.
Spoon bread belongs to the long line of Southern cornmeal dishes soft enough to require a spoon rather than a knife, and it is generally traced to earlier porridge and hasty-pudding cookery built on Native American use of maize; the technique of scalding meal with hot liquid and lightening it with beaten eggs is essentially a cornmeal soufflé. "The Story of Crisco" (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to persuade cooks that hydrogenated cottonseed oil could stand in for lard and butter across an entire cookbook, so regional favourites like this one were included partly to show the new fat at home in traditional Southern baking — even though, as here, three tablespoonfuls of it are doing very little of the work. The note that it is "especially good served with roast pork" reflects the standard place of spoon bread on the table: a starch served hot alongside the meat, not a bread passed in a basket.