The Search for a Vintage Cornbread

[Loyalist Dave]

Cornbread is rather universal in many camps at living history events, and may come in all sorts of variations. I am experimenting with some "de-engineering" of the dish, to see exactly what a person on the frontier might have produced. Reason being, historic sources don't necessarily give you what "the poor" were making to eat. A lot of folks on a subsistence living style might also not be able to read, or perhaps were not able to spend money for a book that told them to use ingredients that they could not afford, or more properly may not have been available to due distance, time of the year, etc.

(The Following is SWAG Conjecture)...
The first thing that I did was removed the wheat flour. Wheat is labor intensive, and could be expensive in the days when folks crossed the Appalachian Mountains looking to homestead. I also removed the milk, as although some folks might have had an English Red-Cow for milk, that may have been a luxury. That left me with corn products, water, salt, and eggs. It would be a lot easier to take two to three laying hens West, than to take them and a cow, and the eggs would be a good source of protein.

Now they would have wood ash because they would have campfires and after the cabin was built, a hearth and fireplace. So they could've made hominy. If they were grinding dent corn or flint corn, then they could also grind the hominy. When one gets the hominy ground to a fine flour, you have Masa flour. Well known in Mexico and farther South, but I wondered IF it was known by another name on the early American frontier. SO ... I used Masa flour and eggs. I also added a bit of vinegar, because that would be easy to carry along too.

(I also know full well that I may discover that the earliest was cornpone or spoon bread, but this experimental archaeology doesn't take up too much of my time)

Here's the recipe

MASA CORN BREAD

First Recipe 03/04/2024​

2 Cups Masa Corn Flour

2 whole eggs

½ tablespoon of baking powder

2½ - 3 cups water

½ teaspoon salt.



1 Nine-inch pie tin, buttered

Oven preheated to 400°F

Wooden spoon



Mix dry ingredients. Add the eggs and mix, and finally add the water, two cups first, then as you stir the mixture, add water until the dough become more like a batter. Pour into buttered pie tin, and then place the filled pie tin into the oven. I used a buttered aluminum tin, but you could use lard or sweet oil and a cast iron skillet or a Dutch Oven...

Bake for 30 minutes, perhaps longer. Remove and allow to cool before cutting.

RESULTS:
Crumb was present but loaf was still a little dough-like, and bottom had only started to brown. Be sure your oven temp is correct, and a good pre-heat is an excellent idea. Taste was very much the same as a corn tortilla or pupusa, which was to be expected. Adding salted butted improved the taste.

So the next experiment is to see what happens without the baking powder, a 19th century product. I will do one without anything, and then one using ash from the fire, and see if any leavening happens. NOW I could use Soda Ash aka Sodium Carbonate (not Sodium BIcarbonate) but that wasn't a patented item until 1791, so a little "late" for wide use in baking in the 18th century,....,

I could try Ammonium Carbonate, aka hartshorn, but..., it's historically accurate for cookies (biscuits for you British folks) but thin cookies, not quick breads, because in a thicker mass a strong ammonia smell gets trapped, which is cooked off when baking cookies.

I also found that Sodium Bicarbonate is a 19th century thing....

And Again...., I may find that cornpone, spoonbread, or perhaps corn fritters were the simplest forms of bread, and not really documented because the folks resorting to those on a daily basis had more important things to do than keep a detailed journal, etc.

LD

 

[TDM]

Very interesting experiment you have going LD. Look forward to the new results. And thanks for mentioning Spoon Bread, my Mother made that fairly regularly when I was young and I had totally forgotten about it!

 

[Brokennock]

Interesting project. I'm looking forward to the next installments.

I'd be very interested to see you not use the butter. After all, you removed the milk from the recipe for lack of a cow,,, so you wouldn't have butter either. I do wonder if any of them might have had a crock full of what we now call ghee on the wagon for the trip? They could have prepared ot ahead of time as part of the process of getting ready to leave. It is a bit more shelf stable than regular butter.

I may find that cornpone, spoonbread, or perhaps corn fritters were the simplest forms of bread, and not really documented because the folks resorting to those on a daily basis had more important things to do than keep a detailed journal, etc.

True, but people use this "reason"/excuse for a lot of supposition. I seem to recall a few books/journals of travelers, sometimes from England (with no intention of staying) or France who traveled about all parts of colonial America seeing what the the land, people, and life, was like. I vaguely recall at least one mentioning the dietary habits of some "inhabitants."
Maybe some answers can be found in one?
I've often wondered if there is a similar journal, or several, sitting untranslated in some French or German library somewhere....

 

[Notchy Bob]

This is a great topic, @Loyalist Dave .

Not being critical, but for the sake of open discussion, I don’t necessarily think the eggs or butter would have been used in the original cornbread. I grew up in a very traditional southern family, and cornbread in some form or other was a staple. The ingredients were cornmeal, salt, and water, and you need some sort of grease in the pan. Cornbread made with eggs was called “egg bread,” and was seldom made or consumed in either side of my extended family.

One point to consider is that in making traditional cornbread, the water was always scalding hot when mixed with the meal.

Another important point is how the meal was made. Dave used masa, but I’m not so sure about that. I actually researched this some a year or so ago in developing my own version of cornbread. Stone ground meal preserves the natural sugars in the corn. Most commercially available cornmeals available today are made by crushing the grains under rollers. This somehow changes the chemical composition, and explains why sugar is so often incorporated into cornbread recipes now. In thinking about this, I recalled that the indigenous people of our American southwest and Mexico used a stone mano and metate for making meal. I don’t know if the result would be considered ground or crushed… likely a combination. Here in the east, they generally used a mortar and pestle, and I suppose the grains would have been crushed. Esoteric points to ponder.

My friend @Brokennock also made a good point about butter. Families on the frontier, as well as the trading posts, tried to keep a milk cow, and 19th century emigrants tried to bring dairy animals with them. However, I believe lard would have more likely been used in cooking, and without swine, bear grease or buffalo or deer tallow would serve. Traditional cooks whom I know now seem to prefer peanut oil, which would not have been available on the frontier or in colonial times, but lard still has a place in some kitchens.

Finally, there’s soda. As noted above, really traditional southern cornbread has three ingredients, but in reading original texts from the 19th century frontier, you see “saleratus” included with the essential supplies like flour, bacon, salt, coffee, etcetera. “Saleratus” is sodium bicarbonate, the principal ingredient in baking powder. It is my understanding that this was a 19th century development, although it may have been known earlier. A chemist may need to explain the difference, but I understand that sodium carbonate does not change, chemically, when heated, but sodium bicarbonate does. In any event, 19th century travelers made it a point to bring saleratus with their supplies.

This is a good thread! I look forward to reading more.

Notchy Bob

 

[Loyalist Dave]

This is a great topic, @Loyalist Dave .

Not being critical, but for the sake of open discussion, I don’t necessarily think the eggs or butter would have been used in the original cornbread. I grew up in a very traditional southern family, and cornbread in some form or other was a staple. The ingredients were cornmeal, salt, and water, and you need some sort of grease in the pan. Cornbread made with eggs was called “egg bread,” and was seldom made or consumed in either side of my extended family.

One point to consider is that in making traditional cornbread, the water was always scalding hot when mixed with the meal.

Another important point is how the meal was made. Dave used masa, but I’m not so sure about that. I actually researched this some a year or so ago in developing my own version of cornbread. Stone ground meal preserves the natural sugars in the corn. Most commercially available cornmeals available today are made by crushing the grains under rollers. This somehow changes the chemical composition, and explains why sugar is so often incorporated into cornbread recipes now. In thinking about this, I recalled that the indigenous people of our American southwest and Mexico used a stone mano and metate for making meal. I don’t know if the result would be considered ground or crushed… likely a combination. Here in the east, they generally used a mortar and pestle, and I suppose the grains would have been crushed. Esoteric points to ponder.

Excellent information and thanks. The problem with only eating cornmeal, especially in the winter, is that the lack of vitamin B3, but one avoids that naturally by using Masa because when corn is changed to Hominy the B3 is chemically changed so humans can absorb it. So Masa or a combination of masa and corn meal and one doesn't get sick. Pellagra is the malady one gets from a lack of B3, and wasn't well known in most of the areas of the United States where corn meal was a major part of the diet because in those areas Hominy was also part of the whole picture.

When the United States in the 1800's shipped a lot of corn and corn meal to Italy, they ground it up and it was very cheap so the poor at a lot of it, and there was an outbreak of pellagra.

This is an experiment for pre-1800 frontier "bread". Wheat and rye are omitted. Barley wasn't yet grown because there weren't very many malt houses. So that leaves corn, which was the preferred crop for folks staking claims to land.

Another important point is how the meal was made. Dave used masa, but I’m not so sure about that. I actually researched this some a year or so ago in developing my own version of cornbread. Stone ground meal preserves the natural sugars in the corn. Most commercially available cornmeals available today are made by crushing the grains under rollers. This somehow changes the chemical composition, and explains why sugar is so often incorporated into cornbread recipes now. In thinking about this, I recalled that the indigenous people of our American southwest and Mexico used a stone mano and metate for making meal. I don’t know if the result would be considered ground or crushed… likely a combination. Here in the east, they generally used a mortar and pestle, and I suppose the grains would have been crushed. Esoteric points to ponder.

Ah but the corn that they used back then is generally not what they use in cornmeal today. It was flint corn, and dent corn is closer than corn hybrids used today. The rollers generate heat, but it doesn't actually change the sugars. Cornmeal recipes that used baking soda and some sort of fat, tend to be bitter, because the chemical in the baking soda will form proto-soap molecules, which your taste buds pick up, and the sugar counteracts that.

One of the major steps in using a mano Y matate is removing the husks with water and ash, and that makes the corn, hominy. The other problem is that a mano y matate are stone, and not just any stone, and they survive, yet you don't find such tools anyplace in the colonies.

The other way of "grinding corn" is a standing mortar, which are still used in Africa, South America, and Asia. These may be made out of hardwood, and work well when there are no millstones and a mill.

There is no leavening agent other than yeast, until the 1790's. save for hartshorn, but that leaves a very disagreeable ammonia flavor and aroma to anything but thin cookies. I have a feeling that either a thin cornpone or spoonbread are about all that is going to be possible for what they had. One can get some artificial leavening from some wood ash and vinegar but that may not have been a well known concept.

My friend @Brokennock also made a good point about butter. Families on the frontier, as well as the trading posts, tried to keep a milk cow, and 19th century emigrants tried to bring dairy animals with them. However, I believe lard would have more likely been used in cooking, and without swine, bear grease or buffalo or deer tallow would serve. Traditional cooks whom I know now seem to prefer peanut oil, which would not have been available on the frontier or in colonial times, but lard still has a place in some kitchens.

The problem there is that the first families on the "frontier" were often without a cow or a hog. When indentured servants were cut loose, a cow or a hog, was not one of the things with which they were gifted. An indentured tradesman had his tools and was expected and often did set up as a free tradesman in a settlement, but the folks indentured for agriculture got clothing and just a few basic tools... and off they went. Most of what they were able to save went toward a firearm.

Bear grease might be an answer. Bison tallow might also be a good one. Deer tallow I find bad tasting, so I don't think they would've used that any more than they would've used the fat from a groundhog, and what I've sampled of deer tallow has been from deer having very tasty venison, so I can't imagine tallow from acorn fed deer was better.

I've seen folks make Ash-Cakes from scalding water and cornmeal, which when it cooled down the cornmeal was a mush and softer, and they then toasted them on the hot ash in the fire. They come out as sort of a crumbly, unslated, corn chip flavored item.

Part of my problem is I may be expecting the end product to sorta resemble modern cornbread when done...

LD

 

[Loyalist Dave]

Interesting project. I'm looking forward to the next installments.

I'd be very interested to see you not use the butter. After all, you removed the milk from the recipe for lack of a cow,,, so you wouldn't have butter either. I do wonder if any of them might have had a crock full of what we now call ghee on the wagon for the trip? They could have prepared ot ahead of time as part of the process of getting ready to leave. It is a bit more shelf stable than regular butter.


True, but people use this "reason"/excuse for a lot of supposition. I seem to recall a few books/journals of travelers, sometimes from England (with no intention of staying) or France who traveled about all parts of colonial America seeing what the the land, people, and life, was like. I vaguely recall at least one mentioning the dietary habits of some "inhabitants."
Maybe some answers can be found in one?
I've often wondered if there is a similar journal, or several, sitting untranslated in some French or German library somewhere....

I just used the butter as a release from the pan, because it was handy.
I could've used lard

i could use sweet oil. I should probably use a skillet and sweet oil in the future. There wasn't any butter in the actual recipe

LD

 

[Ohio Rusty]

1 3/4's cups of Martha White cornmeal mix, 1/4 cup bread flour, 1 egg, 1 and 3/4 cups of buttermilk, 1/4 cup of sugar and a little more for good luck. Greased iron skillet with crisco. 450 degrees for 20 minutes. Makes a nice soft corn bread. I really like grape jelly on my cornbread.

Ohio Rusty ><>

 

[Jay Templin]

So the earliest references to white people making cornbread in North America are 17th century but omit anything like a recipe. It’s most likely that they were adding ground corn into a cheat bread recipe in the same way that when wheat flour was scarce they made horse bread by adding ground dried peas to stretch it. (“Horse” in this case meaning “coarse” or “large,” like in “horseradish.” The earliest descriptions of Indian cornbread are of a stiff dough of meal, fat, and hot water. Sometimes baked in the coals, and sometimes wrapped around dried fruit and nuts, rolled in corn husks and boiled like a tamale.
My favourite of the historic cornbread recipes is Mary Randolph’s:
“Rub a piece of butter the size of an egg into a pint of cornmeal, make a batter with two eggs and some new milk, add a spoonful of yeast, set it by the fire an hour to rise, butter little pans and bake it.”
Jay

 

[Loyalist Dave]

1 3/4's cups of Martha White cornmeal mix, 1/4 cup bread flour, 1 egg, 1 and 3/4 cups of buttermilk, 1/4 cup of sugar and a little more for good luck. Greased iron skillet with crisco. 450 degrees for 20 minutes. Makes a nice soft corn bread. I really like grape jelly on my cornbread.View attachment 301093
Ohio Rusty ><>

That's very tasty looking, and sounds great, but I'm looking for something possible on the frontier in the 18th century....thanks anyway

LD

 

[BillinOregon]

Interesting experimental kitchen archaeology Dave. I am wondering if baking your cornbread over coals in a spider with a lid would get you closer to what you are seeking. Purely as an aside, there is a recipe thread on one of my Texas forums where the fella is adding chopped crawdads to his cornbread. I have no idea when crayfish show up on colonial tables.

 

[Loyalist Dave]

So the earliest references to white people making cornbread in North America are 17th century but omit anything like a recipe. It’s most likely that they were adding ground corn into a cheat bread recipe in the same way that when wheat flour was scarce they made horse bread by adding ground dried peas to stretch it. (“Horse” in this case meaning “coarse” or “large,” like in “horseradish.” The earliest descriptions of Indian cornbread are of a stiff dough of meal, fat, and hot water. Sometimes baked in the coals, and sometimes wrapped around dried fruit and nuts, rolled in corn husks and boiled like a tamale.
My favourite of the historic cornbread recipes is Mary Randolph’s:
“Rub a piece of butter the size of an egg into a pint of cornmeal, make a batter with two eggs and some new milk, add a spoonful of yeast, set it by the fire an hour to rise, butter little pans and bake it.”
Jay

I didn't find anything by her earlier than 1828....,

I also found these from The Virginia Housewife 1828 by Mary Rudolph....

BATTER CAKES. BOIL two cups of small homony [hominy] very soft; add an equal quantity of corn meal with a little salt, and a large spoonful of butter; make it in a thin batter with three eggs, and a sufficient quantity of milk-beat all together some time, and bake them on a griddle, or in woffle [waffle] irons.. When eggs cannot be procured, yeast makes a good substitute; put a spoonful in the batter, and let it stand an hour to rise.

BATTER BREAD. TAKE six spoonsful of flour and three of corn meal, with a little salt-sift them, and make a thin batter with four eggs, and a sufficient quantity of rich milk; bake it in little tin molds in a quick oven....


This one is quite interesting as it mentions "rice flour" which I thought was a very Asian or modern times thing here in North America, plus the use of hominy and rice to make johnny cake..., AND it's Gluten Free for you folks that need that...

RICE JOURNEY, OR JOHNNY CAKE. BOIL a pint of rice quite soft, with a tea-spoonful of salt; mix with it while hot a large spoonful of butter, and spread it on a dish to cool; when perfectly cold, add a pint of rice flour and half a pint of milk- beat them all together till well mingled. Take the middle part of the head of a barrel, make it quite clean, wet it, and put on the mixture about an inch thick, smooth with a spoon, and baste it with a little milk; set the board aslant before clear coals; when sufficiently baked, slip a thread under the cake and turn it: baste and bake that side in a similar manner, split it, and butter while hot. Small homony [hominy] boiled and mixed with rice flour, is better than all rice; and if baked very thin, and afterwards toasted and buttered, it is nearly as good as cassada [cassava] bread

All of the above are from kitchens that are well supplied. So I'm still leaning on ash cakes, or corn pone as the "earlier" version...

Corn meal with scalding water, and then let sit to well hydrate, and then fried on a little greast in a skillet is a corn-pone, and likely the answer...,
A Pupusa is merely the same thing but uses hominy flour (masa flour) and is stuffed, but if just the batter and simply fried on a skillet with a little sweet oil, or animal fat, it would be a hominy-pone or a masa-pone...


There is a "gluten" in corn but it doesn't affect folks as wheat-gluten.... I wonder how long corn gluten takes to bind to itself, if it ever does ???


LD

 

[1950DAVE]

From "The Southern Gardener and Receipt Book" by P. Thornton 1845. From the simplicity of this one I’d say it dates to a much earlier time. I have not tried it.
LIGHT CORN BREAD
Stir four pints of meal into three pints of warm water, add one large teaspoon of salt, let it rise five or six hours, then stir it up with the hand, and bake it in a brisk oven.
Another method is to make mush, and before it gets cold, stir in a half pint of meal. Let it rise, bake it as the first.
Forgot to mention that you can find the book as a pdf.

 

[NeilMacleod]

Great Discussion !!

I use Masa and Lard.
One of the most important lesson I learned was that flour needs to Hydrate properly, at least one hour depending on the flour. So the Masa will puff up much better when fully hydrated and less crumble. Have used this for making pancakes too.

 

[TDM]

That's another great book tip @1950DAVE! Found the PDF and added it to my collection. Thanks.

 

[Notchy Bob]

Excellent information and thanks. The problem with only eating cornmeal, especially in the winter, is that the lack of vitamin B3, but one avoids that naturally by using Masa because when corn is changed to Hominy the B3 is chemically changed so humans can absorb it. So Masa or a combination of masa and corn meal and one doesn't get sick. Pellagra is the malady one gets from a lack of B3, and wasn't well known in most of the areas of the United States where corn meal was a major part of the diet because in those areas Hominy was also part of the whole picture.

When the United States in the 1800's shipped a lot of corn and corn meal to Italy, they ground it up and it was very cheap so the poor at a lot of it, and there was an outbreak of pellagra.

View attachment 301088

This is an experiment for pre-1800 frontier "bread". Wheat and rye are omitted. Barley wasn't yet grown because there weren't very many malt houses. So that leaves corn, which was the preferred crop for folks staking claims to land.



Ah but the corn that they used back then is generally not what they use in cornmeal today. It was flint corn, and dent corn is closer than corn hybrids used today. The rollers generate heat, but it doesn't actually change the sugars. Cornmeal recipes that used baking soda and some sort of fat, tend to be bitter, because the chemical in the baking soda will form proto-soap molecules, which your taste buds pick up, and the sugar counteracts that.

One of the major steps in using a mano Y matate is removing the husks with water and ash, and that makes the corn, hominy. The other problem is that a mano y matate are stone, and not just any stone, and they survive, yet you don't find such tools anyplace in the colonies.

View attachment 301085

The other way of "grinding corn" is a standing mortar, which are still used in Africa, South America, and Asia. These may be made out of hardwood, and work well when there are no millstones and a mill.

View attachment 301086

There is no leavening agent other than yeast, until the 1790's. save for hartshorn, but that leaves a very disagreeable ammonia flavor and aroma to anything but thin cookies. I have a feeling that either a thin cornpone or spoonbread are about all that is going to be possible for what they had. One can get some artificial leavening from some wood ash and vinegar but that may not have been a well known concept.



The problem there is that the first families on the "frontier" were often without a cow or a hog. When indentured servants were cut loose, a cow or a hog, was not one of the things with which they were gifted. An indentured tradesman had his tools and was expected and often did set up as a free tradesman in a settlement, but the folks indentured for agriculture got clothing and just a few basic tools... and off they went. Most of what they were able to save went toward a firearm.

Bear grease might be an answer. Bison tallow might also be a good one. Deer tallow I find bad tasting, so I don't think they would've used that any more than they would've used the fat from a groundhog, and what I've sampled of deer tallow has been from deer having very tasty venison, so I can't imagine tallow from acorn fed deer was better.

I've seen folks make Ash-Cakes from scalding water and cornmeal, which when it cooled down the cornmeal was a mush and softer, and they then toasted them on the hot ash in the fire. They come out as sort of a crumbly, unslated, corn chip flavored item.

Part of my problem is I may be expecting the end product to sorta resemble modern cornbread when done...

LD

Epic post, Dave!

In discussion of ethnic or period foodways, it is so easy to ignore the most important point, which is that it’s all about nutrition. Dave has pointed us in that direction.

Comments about B3 (niacin) were noted. I can’t add much, but I understand legumes ( along with red meats, fish, poultry, nuts…) are good sources of niacin. We should have sent the Italians beans along with the cornmeal. American Indians might not have been able to tell you about vitamin B3, but they knew they were on to something growing the “Three Sisters,” meaning corn, beans, and squash (including pumpkins).

Dave also made an excellent point regarding varieties of corn… they have different physical as well as nutritional properties.

I’m looking forward to reading this conversation as it develops!

Notchy Bob

 

[SDSmlf]

I really like grape jelly on my cornbread.

We have come to love muscadine jelly on our cornbread. Not always easily, but you can collect them in the woods as they grow wild around here.

 

[Ohio Rusty]

That's very tasty looking, and sounds great, but I'm looking for something possible on the frontier in the 18th century....thanks anyway

LD

The earliest 18th century recipe I know of is 'Rye and Injun'. They used the rye flour with the corn flour to extend the flour they had to use. Any wheat flour they might have had was sold for a better profit, eventually ending up across the pond as the english demanded white soft bead. Barley flour was used for bread and many 18th century recipes show barley four. I call that servant bread because it was one of the cheapest flours. You might look to see if a Townsends video may have addressed this recipe already.
Ohio Rusty ><>

 

[Rawhide67]

Forgive my ignorance but are we talking about mixing actual ash from a wood fire into something to be eaten?

 

[Brokennock]

I'm looking for something possible on the frontier in the 18th century....thanks anyway

The book is available through Amazon. I have the ebook which allows one to highlight and screenshot things... I am slowly learning that there are some benefits to ebooks

 

[Some_Mook]

Sloosh