Cornmeal Ragged Robins (1918)

Why a quick bread made sense

The recipe appears in Foods That Will Win the War and How to Cook Them, written by C. Houston Goudiss and Alberta M. Goudiss and published in New York by World Syndicate Company in 1918. It sits in a short chapter called "The Use of Corn," inside a section on why households were being asked to save wheat.

The authors walk through the problem. Yeast bread needs gluten, and apart from rye, the other grains don't have enough of it. Cornmeal, they write, can go into a yeast loaf at only about 10 percent before the bread turns heavy and small. Quick breads avoid that limit, so the book steers readers toward them: "The home baker can better serve her country by introducing into her menus numerous quick breads that can be made from cornmeal, rye, corn and rye, hominy, and buckwheat."

The campaign behind all this was run by the U.S. Food Administration under Herbert Hoover, which asked households to keep wheatless and meatless days. By early 1918, newspapers were printing the schedule as wheatless Monday and Wednesday and a meatless Tuesday.

One formula, three grains

The same book also prints Rolled Oats Ragged Robins in its oats chapter and Rye Ragged Robins in its rye chapter. All three keep the cup of bread flour, the milk, the cream of tartar, the fat and the soda, and swap the cup and a half of cornmeal for oats or rye flour. The book treats it as one formula with a changeable grain. It never explains the name, and ragged robin is also a wildflower.

What the cream of tartar is doing

Baking powder is, at heart, baking soda packed with a dry acid, and cream of tartar was the original acid. This recipe measures the two separately: 2 1/2 teaspoons of cream of tartar to 1 1/4 teaspoons of soda. That's exactly the common 2-to-1 ratio for making baking powder at home. Some extension charts use a little more acid, closer to 2 1/2 to 1, so the book's balance may leave a little soda unneutralized.

We kept the book's amounts anyway. This kind of acid starts reacting as soon as it gets wet, so the dough isn't one to leave sitting before it bakes.

Choosing the fat and the heat

The recipe says only "fat." A caption just before the corn chapter cites U.S. Food Administration regulations and asks cooks to leave fat and sweetening out of breads, adding, "Whenever Fat Is Used, Use Drippings." This recipe still calls for four tablespoons. The chapter on saving fat lists "hydrogenated oils, home-rendered fats, lard and beef and mutton suet" for shortening and keeps butter for the table. Cold lard or vegetable shortening fits that list and stays firm enough to cut into the dry ingredients.

"Hot oven" needed a number. The book's only stated baking temperature is 450°F, for wheat bread and rolls, and it adds that breads made with other grains want "a little lower temperature." A 1931 USDA baking bulletin puts a hot oven at 400° to 425°F. So this version bakes at 425°F (220°C), the top of that range and a step below the book's 450°F. The 12 to 15 minutes come straight from the source. For the wider wheat and meat campaign, see our article on wheatless and meatless cooking in 1918.