Church cookbooks have some real gems in them
- Scott Daniels: We Ate Well and Cheaply
- May 31, 2019
- 1432
How can it be so difficult to get a decent pan of cornbread? Over the long weekend, I had a chance to try two recipes from The Joy of Cooking: one for pancakes, which was very successful, and one for cornbread, which was a flop.
I can’t say why the first was so good, as the recipe was really no different from any other basic pancake recipe: flour, sugar, salt, baking powder, egg, milk, melted butter. It’s all pretty standard in the quick bread family.
Maybe it was the insistence on sifting the dry ingredients a couple of times that made the difference. They were the closest to the best restaurant flapjacks I’ve found yet.
Encouraged by this, I gave the cornbread recipe a shot. Again, quick bread basics: flour, cornmeal, milk, egg, baking powder, salt, sugar and in this case melted bacon dripping. I substituted lard, which is, as they say, same difference.
The recipe called for adding the melted fat to the batter and also heating fat in the pan in the oven before pouring the batter into the hot pan to bake. The result tasted like cornmeal fried in lard: dull, crumbly and dry.
I’m probably after Mom’s cornbread I remember from childhood, which I’m almost certain was a Jiffy mix with extra sugar. Though when I’ve tried that, it’s not right either. I used to break a big chunk of it up in a bowl and add milk and sugar, as a cereal substitute.
So I’m trying to get a product that is sweet and cake-like and comes out light and high in the pan. I thought I had it nailed last summer but couldn’t get the balance between “cake-like” and “raw batter in the middle.”
The bigger question is how results can be so different from recipes that are pretty much universal. Quick breads, meaning those without yeast as a leavening agent, all follow the same formula.
The cake sort of things you bake in a pan have an egg in them and more liquid. End products that are more like bread, like biscuits or scones, omit the egg. Otherwise they are the same ingredients with few variables, like buttermilk instead of milk, oil or shortening in place of butter and the specific grain used. They are all the same recipes.
So how can they taste so different from place to place, recipe to recipe, kitchen to kitchen?
I like to use cookbooks like The Joy of Cooking or Fanny Farmer to look for good versions of basics, rather than as a go-to for fancy dishes. I’m sure Jacques Pépin can make a humdinger cornbread, but that’s the more likely source for a good duck recipe or fancy ways to serve leeks.
Great recipes for things like cornbread and pancakes, biscuits and coffee cake are the domain of all-purpose American cookbooks or, better still, those ring-bound little books, which were produced by the truckload by churches and women’s auxiliary organizations in the postwar period. Used book shops and thrift stores always have an embarrassment of them on the shelves, and they go begging for buyers.
I would suggest they are the place to find the recipes your grandmother made but were not preserved or handed down. If you happen to have your grandmother’s stuff, the church cookbooks she troubled herself to buy probably have some real gems in them, not for beef Wellington or salmon in puff pastry, but for darn good casseroles, breakfast breads and, if you’re lucky, a decent cornbread recipe.
Please share it with me if you find one.