CORN BREAD

an important article of food in the South, and in farm-life elsewhere, which deserves yet fuller recognition. To be enjoyed at its best, it should be served hot and should be freely buttered. “Corn bread,’’ specifically, is baked in a shallow pan in the oven. It may consist simply of cornmeal, a little lard or butter, salt, and water, or it may contain also one or more of several other ingredients—as wheat-flour, milk (fresh or sour) or buttermilk, eges, sugar, baking powder or soda or yeast, ete. The famous ‘‘Creoile corn bread,’’ or ‘‘ege bread,’’ is made with straight cornmeal—only the finest and whitest of white meal, never the vellow—buttermilk, butter, salt, ege yolks beaten very light, and egg whites whipped to a stiff froth. Corn muffins and Corn dodgers are the same products in small size. Corn pone is an alternative southern title for corn bread—used for. both the plainest and the richest. It is from the Indian pone, apone, and oppone, all signifying ‘*bread’’ made by cooking thin cakes of cornmeal in hot ashes. Hoe cake was originally a plain cake, either of cornmeal or wheat-flour, so named beeause the old-time plantation ‘‘mammy’’ often cooked it on the broad blade of a cotton-hoe set over hot embers in front of a wood fire. The term is now applied also, and chiefly, to a richer ‘‘biscuit bread’’ of wheat-flour baked either on a griddle or in an oven, and popular in southern households for eating with a gla of milk or ere am and as an accompaniment to fruit compotes. Ash cake is a plain cornmeal cake baked by burying it in the hot wood ashes. When done, it is easily wiped clean of ashes (if the cook is a competent one). Johnny-cake is to-day in the North a popular term for almost any kind of corn bread, and in the South chiefly for those of egg-enriched formulas, but by its first significance it was a plain cornmeal cake cooked on a griddle or baked in a flat pan in the ashes or on an oaken board before an open fire. In Australia, a johnny-cake is one of wheat-meal baked in ashes or fried in a pan, Steamed corn bread—wheat-flour, mola es, milk, and baking powder added to the cornmeal—is eaten rather as a pudding (with sweet sauces, etc.) than as bread.