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.
conveniently
identified as “the freshman class of baby-boomers,” I cordially invite the
young to discover that driving to work or school is something for old people
to do. Pathetic, broken-down old people whose elephant ankles puff out
over the tops of their ugly pointy-toed shoes, who probably smoke, who
certainly eat a lot of saturated fats, very likely from pork, and whose idea of
conversation is blurting out what they believe to be their friends' secrets—as
if they had friends, as if the stories they repeat about their acquaintances
were secrets, or as if those things were even true. The “need” to drive three
blocks instead of walking is definitely part of the syndrome that contributes
to that kind of repulsive old age, so it deserves to be stereotyped with the
ugliest aspects of that syndrome.
and Tam the Untamed is
unpolished enough that it does sound like mostly true memoirs,
“improved” no doubt, but fact-based. It's possible that Patchett always
intended to market the dog stories to dog lovers and the horse stories to horse
lovers.
, where the
alpha horse who knows one human friend, but no master, gets to go feral in
peace. Fictional Mary does more of the things real children dream of doing than
any fictional human-child protagonist I can remember, verging on the pure
fantasies of Mowgli, Tarzan, or Pippi, but obviously the real Mary Elwyn
Patchett did settle down into human society; that does not necessarily mean
that Tam did.
will fit. He visits an alarmingly nasty toxic waste dump called
Chabarovice, compares it with the famous traditional cleanness of Germany, and
suggests that socialism contributes to the messiness of Chabarovice. This web
site withholds comments.
was also hilarious, and 
has much to recommend it. Which is your favorite?
