Book Review: Great Baking Begins with White Lily Flour

Title: Great Baking Begins with White Lily Flour

Author: The Federal Company

Date: 1982

Publisher: Meredith

ISBN: none

Length: 93 pages plus 3-page index

Illustrations: many color photos, some drawings

Quote: “This cookbook celebrates a century of great baking with White Lily Flour.”

In the case of the company that bought out J. Allen Smith of Knoxville, “Federal” was merely a trademark—though one that seemed congruent with Smith's faith in the federal Food & Drug Administration. This is a private company that sponsored the publication of a Better Homes & Gardens-style cookbook featuring highly refined, bleached-white flour and cornmeal. While we all learned in the mid-twentieth century that the appearance of light brown or yellow bran in flour and meal mean you're getting more fiber and nutrition, in Smith's day (the 1880s) there was a legitimate concern that consumers might be getting straw and dirt.

“Cornmeal mix” was another political issue around the turn of the twentieth century. Although the first European immigrants brought wheat to the Southeastern States and did their best to provide themselves with wheat flour, most of the Southeastern States just don't have the kind of drought-ridden climate wheat needs to be a profitable crop. Rye, buckwheat, sorghum, and millet did better in a damp climate, but the native grain that was relatively easy for Southerners to produce at home, year after year, was maize—which rather quickly came to be what Americans mean by “corn.” It was delicious, and as long as people were getting more protein and B-vitamins than they really needed, the niacin-blocking effects of corn bran were not a problem.

However, by the turn of the century some cases of pellagra were found among people who ate cornbread every day and seldom if ever ate “store-bought” grains. Storekeepers seized the marketing opportunity and backed a campaign to give white flour biscuits (which are extremely simple carbs, and close to being empty calories) snob appeal, to associate pure cornbread with the malnourished, ignorant, and consequently sickly people who developed pellagra.

In Virginia, when I was growing up, even older people denied having ever actually known anyone who had pellagra; it was imagined as something people got in Alabama or Mississippi. Nevertheless, some older people bought into the idea that mixing in a little bleached white “store-bought” flour somehow made all cornmeal products “better.” Mixing in whole wheat flour with plenty of wheat bran does boost the nutritional value of cornmeal for those who can digest the wheat gluten, but mixing in white flour...well...white flour plus water equals paste, and adding a bit of that paste to cornbread makes it less crumbly, but it's still junkfood.

Traditional Southern cornbread does not have to be made with an egg, or eggs, and milk or buttermilk, but traditional Southern farms tended to be lavishly supplied with those things, and using them does add some extra niacin to offset the niacin-blocking effect of the corn bran. People who used milk and eggs in their cornbread were not usually the ones who developed pellagra. However, some of those people became the stereotypical grumpy, dyspeptic senior citizens who don't realize that they're losing the ability to digest cow's milk and that that's what's making them feel grumpy.

To neutralize the niacin-blocking effects of corn bran without purchasing wheat products (and ingesting wheat gluten), the traditional method was to “grit” corn by removing the bran. This was done by soaking dried corn in a mix of water and wood ashes until the bran slipped off, thereby producing hominy or “grits.” Fiber and flavor have to be added to hominy by mixing something else with it. This is not a problem for creative cooks. However, it's a problem for the White Lily Company; all their recipes call for the Cornmeal Mix with a generous dose of bleached-out wheat gluten mixed in.

You can of course make any of the cornmeal-based recipes in this book with pure cornmeal, adding leavening and salt, instead of using White Lily Cornmeal Mix. Some years, the White Lily Company has even packed pure cornmeal that was fit to use for that purpose, “self-rising” (having the leavening and salt mixed in) or plain; I've used it and liked it.

Here are some tips for tweaking:

1. The rule for substituting plain cornmeal for Cornmeal Mix or “Self-Rising” cornmeal is to add 1 teaspoon of either baking powder or baking soda and 1 teaspoon of salt per cup of meal. You can reduce or omit the salt, especially if making a sweet recipe, but you need the leavening. Use baking soda if something else in the recipe is acid (buttermilk, tomatoes, pineapple); otherwise use baking powder.

2. You probably also need to heat all-cornmeal dough fast to get a nice light texture; if it's a sweet dough that will scorch if baked at 400 degrees, bring the liquid ingredients to a rapid simmer or slow boil before combining them with the cornmeal.

3. It's actually possible to substitute plain cornmeal even for flour in some of these recipes. I've done it. The results will be crumbly but tasty. Some all-cornmeal recipes hold together better than others; egg, banana, apples, to some extent pumpkin or sweet potatoes, help bind cornmeal bread together, and recipes suggesting each of those options are given in this book. (Flaxseed meal also helps bind cornmeal bread together, but it's not discussed in this book.)

4. However, the finished product will be crumbly. There are ways to get all-corn tortillas, fritters, or pancakes to hold together well enough to be served intact, but you must forget about carving perfect slices with a knife. Gluten-free cornbread is easiest to eat with a spoon. It can be crumbled into milk like breakfast cereal (kids love that), or set on a plate in between juicy vegetables to soak up their juices. Sweet dessert breads made with cornmeal can soak up fruit juices.

So, believe it or not, as a gluten-free cook I've used this cookbook and liked the results...but I had to tweak every single recipe I used. All recipes in this book, as printed, contain wheat gluten and will make celiacs sick.

A final controversy seems petty when compared with the nutritional questions about cornbread...On page 10, the company tries to straddle the Mason-Dixon Line by recommending, for “Basic Corn Bread,” 2 cups of Cornmeal Mix and “1 tablespoon sugar (optional).” If you don't add the sugar, no points for guessing, your cornbread will have a nice savory salty flavor, rather like biscuits. Yes, this is the way traditional Southern cornbread is supposed to taste—the savoriness was often enhanced by using the fat from smoked and/or salted meat for that “shortening, melted,” which made a really salty cornbread if pre-salted Cornmeal Mix was used.

No, the fact that cornbread, by itself, is supposed to taste more salt than sweet, never interfered with Southerners eating all kinds of corn-based desserts...it's just that sweet puddings, cakes, muffins, etc., made with cornmeal, were not cornbread. Salty cornbread was often traditionally eaten with molasses or syrup as a dessert, sometimes topped with fruit or berries like a shortcake. In traditional recipes I've found corn muffins usually made just like cornbread, only with a tablespoon or two of sweetening added per cup of meal.

However, cornmeal works just fine in all sorts of sweet and fruity baked goods. The White Lily Company recommend marbling sweet cornmeal cake with preserves, or mixing corn muffins with pumpkin, or frying corn fritters with cores of fruit. That's a good beginning. Some other tweaks that have pleased me include:

* All-cornmeal banana bread—an unnatural blend of foods that don't grow in the same places, but the textures actually form a synergistic combination, where the well-beaten banana helps both to bind and to lighten the corn dough

* “Nebraska Banana” or pawpaw bread—not so synergistic, and usually I'd rather just eat the pawpaws, but a distinctive dessert

* Chocolate-banana breads—I've tried everything from a decadent banana-chocolate-toffee pudding, to mellower, less sugary banana-chocolate-chip pancakes

* All-cornmeal zucchini bread—not so distinctive, but a pleasant way to use up zucchini

* All-cornmeal pumpkin bread—the Pilgrims undoubtedly ate similar things

* Pecan-enriched cornbread—pecans also enrich a salty cornmeal dough, or they can be mixed with just a bit of dark brown sugar and dark corn syrup, and a good bit of egg, for a cornmeal cake with the flavor of pecan pie

* Corn-based shortcakes—the texture may surprise people, but cornmeal tastes just fine with strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, or peaches

* Corn-based apple cakes or applesauce-spice cakes—applesauce synergizes with either flour or meal, not quite as magically as banana pulp, but with good results

* Corn-based pineapple bread—another unnatural blend, but delicious

Then there are all the “spoon breads,” or puddings that barely form crusts on the bottom but are basically eaten with a spoon. Basic spoon bread contains lots of milk and egg in proportion to cornmeal, and perhaps some sweetening—or some savory ingredients, like the tomato spoon bread suggested in this book. There has never been any rule that spoon bread has to be basic.

And then, of course, there are the savory corn-based baked goods, a tradition that goes all the way back to Cherokee Bean Bread. Bean Bread is made fit to eat by cooking the dried beans (whether they've been ground to meal first, or cooked first and then mashed, which is easier) until they're done before adding the cornmeal. It's still heavy, and I don't blame the White Lily Company for not discussing it in this book—many people who try it don't like it.

Easier to like, and discussed in this book, are the cornbread-based savory treats that feature tomatoes, cheese, sage, onion, peppers, celery, all kinds of meat...again, this book provides only a small handful of suggestions. Cornbread was traditionally stuffed into meat as it roasted and/or crumbled into a dripping pan below the roasted meat, for “dressings,” often with other savory ingredients. When cooking for fewer people in more of a hurry, cooks also mixed small amounts of those savory ingredients right into their cornbread or spoon bread. If the mixture made a stiff dough that was baked, it was traditionally called a loaf or pone; if fried, it was pones or cakes. If it made a batter that baked to a soft puddinglike state, it was still just spoon bread. None of these fancy recipes was as traditional as Real Cornbread, but many of them have been documented in the Southern States for a good long time.

As I review this book, handed down from an elder-in-law, I'm somewhat surprised by the number of these all gluten-based recipes that I've tweaked into successful gluten-free recipes. And yes, in years when White Lily's plain cornmeal has been available unadulterated with bleached wheat flour, I'll gladly testify that it works wonderfully in those tweaked gluten-free recipes. So gluten-free cooks can indeed have...quite a lot of fun with this book.

Happy tweaking!

This is a collectible book; to buy it here, send $10 per book, $5 per package, plus $1 per online payment, as discussed in the "Greeting" post. Four or five more books of this size will fit into one package.