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Old-Fashioned Crackling Bread
Sift one quart of fine cornmeal, add one teaspoonful of salt, one pint of flour and one large cup of cracklings (the residue from tired out leaf lard), chopped fine. Beat two eggs, add one pint of milk and stir into the dry mixture, adding sufficient milk to make a very thick drop batter. Stir in three teaspoonfuls of baking powder, pour in well greased shallow pans and bake in a hot oven about half an hour.
A hog-killing-season bread that depends entirely on having real cracklings. Everything else is straightforward quick-bread technique with period measurements.
- "Tired out" is a typo for "tried out"To try out fat means to render it slowly until the water cooks off and the solids brown. The cracklings are those browned solids, drained of fat and chopped small.
- Cracklings, and what to substituteLeaf lard is the soft fat from around the kidneys, and its cracklings are fine and crisp. Rendered fatback or pork belly gives coarser, meatier ones that work just as well. Commercial pork rinds are salted, so if you use them, cut the added teaspoon of salt back to about a half.
- Dry measuresA quart of cornmeal is 4 cups; a pint of flour is 2 cups. A "large cup" of cracklings is roughly a generous cup.
- Hot ovenIn period terms roughly 400-425F. At that heat the crust sets fast and the cracklings crisp rather than steam, which is the point of the bread.
- Leavening is on the light sideThree teaspoons of baking powder for six cups of dry mixture is modest by current practice, which runs closer to a teaspoon per cup of flour or meal. Expect a dense, close crumb; if you want more lift, go to four or five teaspoons.
- Add the baking powder last, then moveThe original stirs it in after the milk, so the reaction starts immediately. Fold it through, get the batter into the pans and into the oven without pausing.
- Grease it properly, and preheat the panBacon drippings or lard in the pan, heated in the oven until it shimmers before the batter goes in, gives the fried bottom crust this bread is made for.
- Pans and yieldTwo 9-inch pans or one 9x13, filled no more than an inch deep -- "shallow" is doing real work here. About half an hour in a hot oven is right; look for a set center and a deep brown edge. Serves 8 to 10, and it is best within the hour.
Crackling bread belongs to the winter hog-killing, when a household rendered its own lard and had a bowl of crisp brown solids left over that would not keep long. Stirring them into cornbread used them at their best and turned an everyday pan of bread into something substantial enough to carry a meal. The recipe's mix of cornmeal and wheat flour, plus baking powder rather than the older saleratus-and-sour-milk method, suggests a date from the later nineteenth century onward, once commercial baking powder had become a kitchen staple. The name is generally taken to come from the crackling sound associated with crisp rendered fat, though accounts differ as to whether that refers to the rendering or the eating. Versions of the bread are still made across the American South, usually under the spelling cracklin' bread.