Corn Bread
One pint cornmeal, one pint of bread sponge, two- thirds of cupful molasses, one teaspoonful soda. Scald the meal, when cool, add the sponge, molasses and soda. Mix with graham flour stiff as cake; put in tins and when light, bake one hour.
This is a yeast-risen loaf, not the quick soda cornbread the name suggests today. The two things to get right are scalding the meal properly and letting the dough proof before it goes near heat.
- Bread spongeA pint of "sponge" is the loose, bubbly first-stage dough set the night before with yeast, flour and water — about 2 cups of a batter roughly the thickness of pancake batter. If you keep a sourdough starter, an active, well-fed one at 100% hydration stands in directly; otherwise mix 1 cup flour, 1 cup warm water and a teaspoon of instant yeast and let it work 4 to 8 hours until frothy.
- Scald the mealPour boiling water over the cornmeal — roughly equal volume, 2 cups to the pint of meal — and stir to a thick mush. This gelatinizes the starch and softens the hull, which is what keeps the crumb from being gritty. It must cool to blood heat before the sponge goes in or the yeast dies.
- MeasuresA pint is 2 cups by volume. Two-thirds cupful of molasses is best read as an ordinary dark molasses rather than blackstrap, which is bitter and will fight the corn — bearing in mind that period molasses was not necessarily the unsulphured kind sold now.
- Soda with molassesThe teaspoon of soda neutralizes the acid in the molasses and in the fermented sponge; that reaction also gives some lift, though the sponge does most of the raising. Stir it in evenly; a pocket of dry soda leaves a soapy yellow streak.
- Graham flourGraham flour is coarse whole wheat, ground with the bran and germ returned. Modern stone-ground whole wheat is the closest thing. Expect to work in 2 to 3 cups — "stiff as cake" means a heavy batter that holds a spoon upright, not a kneadable dough.
- When lightThe dough is ready when it has risen visibly and domed, perhaps half again in bulk — 1 to 2 hours in a warm kitchen, longer with sourdough. Cornmeal doughs rise sluggishly because there is little gluten to trap gas.
- OvenNo temperature is given because the range had none. An hour suits a moderate oven, 350F, in loaf tins; the loaf is done at 200F internal and will sound hollow underneath.
- YieldThe batch is a large one, and the recipe itself says 'tins', plural: expect two loaves rather than one. It slices best fully cool.
Before commercial baking powder became cheap and reliable, much American home bread is said to have run on a sponge — a portion of fermented batter carried forward or set the night before — and cornmeal breads of this kind sit between the unleavened johnnycake of the earlier colonial kitchen and the quick cornbread of the twentieth century. The pairing of cornmeal, coarse flour and molasses recalls New England brown bread, which is generally traced to the same thrift: wheat flour was the expensive ingredient, so it was stretched with corn and sweetened with molasses rather than sugar.