With the (relative) success of the 1950 Tuna Fish Loaf recipe, I got a bit more ambitious and took on another 1950 recipe, this one a ‘Spoon Corn Bread’ by Mrs. Willa Hill, also from the 1988 Beverly Presbyterian Church cookbook as a returning recipe from the 1950 edition. It did not work out, but I am not sure whether that was user error or the fault of the recipe.

Ingredients

1 cup corn meal, 1 cup boiling water, 1 cup sweet milk, 2 eggs, butter (size of an egg), 1 tsp. sugar, 1/2 tsp salt, 4 tsp (level) baking powder

Recipe

Stir corn meal in boiling water, add eggs, milk, butter, and sugar. Add salt and last add baking powder. Bake at 375 for 20-25 minutes

Again, this is a fairly vague recipe that leaves a lot of room for interpretation/mistakes. I will note in the ingredients I may have had two errors; I couldn’t decide how much an egg sized amount of butter would be in 1950, so I used about 4 tablespoons, I also used a can of sweetened condensed milk, which may not be what the recipe was referencing.

Figuring out a container to mix the ingredients is a challenge. For the corn meal & boiling water mixture you have to use a smaller pot, but then adding the other ingredients to the same pot will bring it very near to overfilling. Possibly as a result of this, I had a lot of difficulty fulling incorporating the activated cornmeal with the other ingredients, and had to keep scooping it around to try and get it actually pouring out semi-equally in the mold. This may have also been the speed at which I added my other ingredients & their order. I added the eggs first and the milk last, and had mixed a couple times between the ingredient additions. It may have been better to go earlier with the milk.

In terms of baking pan, the recipe gives no suggestion on what size to use. I will say I filled three 5 x 3 x 2 inch pans about 3/4 the way full and during the bake they overflowed, so you need something bigger than that. This mix does rise significantly in the bake. I am not sure my pan choice was correct given the overflowing that did occur and the uneven bake. As you can see the tops of the cornbread are burnt, and the middle has caved in and not cooked. To my credit, the bottom is a decent golden-brown. I took a small bite from the bottom of one of the loafs and I did not enjoy it whatsoever. This may be due to the unsuccessful bake, but it did not taste like cornbread to me and was very unpleasant. I wouldn’t recommend this recipe, but I may have done it completely wrong.