Plain corn bread, without flour, milk, or egg, is hard to make eatable without a Dutch oven to bake it in. Even so, it is generally spoiled by being baked too fast and not long enough to be done inside.

Johnny Cake

1 quart meal, 1 teaspoonful salt,

1 pint warm (but not scalding) water (1% pints for old meal).

Stir together until light. Bake to a nice brown all around (about forty-five minutes), and let it sweat fifteen minutes longer in the closed oven, removed from the fire. Yellow meal generally requires more water than white. Freshly ground meal is much better than old.

Corn Dodgers

Same as above, but mix to a stiff dough, and form into cylindrical dodgers four or five inches long and 1^ inches diameter, by rolling between the hands. Have frying-pan very hot, grease it a little, and put dodgers on as you roll them out. As soon as they have browned, put them in oven and bake thoroughly.

Ash Cake

Same kind of dough. Form it into balls as big as hen's eggs, roll in dry flour, lay in hot ashes, and cover completely with them.

Corn Bread (Superior)

1 pint corn meal,

1 pint flour,

3 tablespoon fuls sugar,

2 heaped tablespoonfuls butter,

3 teaspoon fuls baking powder,

1 teaspoonful salt,

2 eggs,

1 pint (or more) milk.

Rub butter and sugar together. Add the beaten eggs; then the milk. Sift the salt and baking powder into the meal and flour. Pour the liquid over the dry ingredients, beating well. Pour batter into well-greased pan, and bake thirty to forty minutes in moderately hot oven. Can also be made into muffins.

Corn Batter Bread

1 pint corn meal,

2 pints milk (or water), 2 eggs,

1 teaspoonful salt.

Beat the eggs light; add the salt; then the meal and milk, gradually, until well blended. Bake about thirty minutes. This is the standard breakfast bread of the South, easily made, and (if the meal is freshly ground) delicious. A little boiled rice, or hominy grits, may be substituted for part of the meal.

Snow Bread

After a fall of light, feathery snow, superior corn bread may be made by stirring together 1 quart corn meal, 1/2 teaspoonful soda, 1 teaspoonful salt, 1 tablespoonful lard.

Then, in a cool place where snow will not melt, stir into above one quart light snow. Bake about forty minutes in rather hot oven. Snow, for some unknown reason, has the same effect on bread as eggs have, two tablespoonfuls of snow equaling one egg. It can also be used in making batter for pancakes, or puddings, the batter being made rather thick, and the snow mixed with each cake just before putting in the pan.

Substitute For Baking Soda

Take the white of wood ashes, same quantity as you would use of soda, and mix dry with the flour. It makes bread rise the same as soda, and you can't tell the difference. The best ashes are those of hickory, dogwood, sugar maple, and corncobs; beech, ash, buckeye, balsam poplar, and yellow poplar are also good.

"Gritted Bread."—When green corn has be-come too hard for boiling, but is still too soft for grinding into meal, make a "gritter," as follows: Take a piece of tin about 7x14 inches (unsolder a lard pail by heating, and flatten the sides); punch holes through it, close together, with a large nail; bend the sheet into a half cylinder, rough side out, like a horseradish grater; nail the edges to a board somewhat longer and wider than the tin. Then, holding the ear of corn pointing lengthwise from you, grate it into a vessel held between the knees.

The meal thus formed will need no water, but can be mixed in its own milk. Salt it, and bake quickly. The flavor of "gritted bread" is a blend of hot pone and roasting ears—delectable! Hard corn can be grated by first soaking the ears over night.