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Southern, or Spoon Corn Bread
Two-thirds pint of white cornmeal, one pint of boiling water, one-half pint of scalding sweet milk, one level tablespoonful of salt, one heaping tablespoonful of butter, two eggs. Scald the meal with the salted boiling water, add the scalding milk; stir well; when well mixed, add the eggs, which have been beaten light. Bake one hour, in baking dish, from which it can be served at table.
A leavening-free spoon bread that sets like a savory pudding rather than a sliceable loaf. The measurements are given in liquid pints, which need translating before anything else.
- The measuresTwo-thirds pint of meal is about 1 1/3 cups; one pint of boiling water is 2 cups; one-half pint of scalding milk is 1 cup. A level tablespoon of salt is a great deal by modern taste — 1 to 2 teaspoons suits most palates, especially if the butter is salted.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given, as was common in cookbooks of the period. The recipe names no oven term, so any figure is inference: an hour's bake is consistent with a moderate oven, around 350F. The center should be set but still quivering, like a baked custard.
- White cornmeal mattersSouthern spoon bread was built on white meal, finely ground and not degerminated. Modern degerminated or coarse meal absorbs liquid differently and gives a grittier result; a fine white stone-ground meal is closer to the original.
- Scald properlyThe hinge of the dish is the mush stage. The boiling water must actually gelatinize the meal into a thick paste before the milk goes in, or the finished bread will be watery underneath and grainy on top.
- Add eggs off the heatThe mixture should be warm, not scalding, when the beaten eggs go in, and they should be whisked in a little at a time. Poured into a very hot mush they scramble, leaving yellow flecks instead of a smooth custard crumb.
- No leaveningThere is no baking powder, soda, or separately whipped white here. The rise comes only from steam and egg, so expect a dense, spoonable pudding — not the puffed spoon bread of later recipes.
- Butter and the dishA heaping tablespoon of butter is listed but never mentioned in the method; it is most easily stirred into the hot mush. Butter the baking dish generously as well. A 1 1/2-quart dish gives the right depth for an hour's bake.
- Yield and serviceServes about six as a side. It is served with a spoon straight from the dish, hot, with more butter — it collapses and stiffens as it cools and does not reheat gracefully.
Spoon bread belongs to the long line of Southern cornmeal dishes eaten with a spoon rather than cut, descended from the porridges and mush that colonial cooks adapted from Native American use of ground maize. The name is generally traced simply to how it reaches the plate: too soft to slice. Its appearance in a general-purpose turn-of-the-century compilation like this one, labeled "Southern," shows how regional American dishes were being collected and presented to a national readership in a period when white and yellow meal, wheat flour breads, and chemical leavenings were all competing for space in the bread chapter. The absence of baking powder here marks it as the older, plainer form of the dish, closer to a baked custard of mush than to the airy versions that later cookbooks produced by folding in beaten egg whites.