Southern Cookery: Breakfast Breads
Recipes for light breads and rolls used in Southern cooking.
Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.
From What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking, by Abby Fisher, 1881.
[Abby Fisher, born an enslaved person in Alabama in 1831, relocated to San Francisco to start a pickling business. Her cookbook was the second ever published by a Black woman in the United States.]
Breakfast Breads
Maryland Beat Biscuit
Take one quart of flour, add one teaspoonful of salt, one tablespoonful of lard, half tablespoonful of butter. Dry rub the lard and butter into the flour until well creamed; add your water gradually in mixing so as to make dough stiff, then put the dough on pastry board and beat until perfectly moist and light. Roll out the dough to thickness of third of an inch. Have your stove hot and bake quickly. To make more add twice the quantity.
Egg Rolls
One quart of flour, half tablespoonful of butter, two eggs lightly beat, half tea-cup of sweet yeast, half tea-cup of water, one teaspoonful of salt. Mix as a sponge, about 10 o'clock at night, for breakfast; put to rise until morning. With dry flour knead the sponge, not too stiff; make off rolls, put to rise in baking pan, then have oven hot and bake slowly. When rolls are done, put them in a napkin until sent to table.
Breakfast Cream Cake
Four eggs beat light, one gill of cream to a tea-cup of sweet milk, one pint of flour, sifted, half teaspoonful of salt; mix cream, milk, and eggs together, well stirred, then add flour gradually until thoroughly mixed. Have your baking cups hot when put to bake. Requires ten minutes to bake in hot oven.
Waffles for Breakfast
Two eggs beat light, one pint of sour milk, to one and a half pint of flour, one teaspoonful of soda sifted with the flour, one tablespoonful of butter, teaspoonful of salt, well mixed, and then add the eggs. Always have your irons perfectly hot and well greased. In baking, melt butter before mixing in flour. Place them in a covered dish and butter them on sending to the table.
Flannel Cake
One quart of flour, quarter tea-cup of yeast, make into a batter, with one teaspoonful of salt; make up over night and put to rise. Just before baking on a nicely greased griddle, for breakfast, add one level teaspoonful of soda, and stir it well into the batter.
Sally Lund
One quart of flour, quarter pound of butter, perfectly rubbed into the flour while dry, one teaspoonful of salt, five eggs beat very light, half tea-cup of milk to quarter tea-cup of yeast; add all to the flour, and stir the whole together as you would pound cake, and put to rise at 10 o'clock at night; next morning beat over until light as cake and put in warm place to rise a second time, after which bake as carefully as baking pound cake.
Bake in the pan it rises in the second time. Just grease the pan before putting to rise the second time.
Breakfast Corn Bread
One tea-cup of rice boiled nice and soft, to one and a half tea-cupful of corn meal mixed together, then stir the whole until light; one teaspoonful of salt, one tablespoonful of lard or butter, three eggs, half tea-cup of sweet milk. The rice must be mixed into the meal while hot; can be baked either in muffin cups or a pan.
Corn Egg Bread
Two eggs, one pint of meal, half pint of sour milk, one teaspoonful of soda, beat eggs very light, one tablespoonful of melted lard or butter, mix all together, well stirred or beaten. Bake in an ordinary pan.
Plantation Corn Bread or Hoe Cake
Half tablespoonful of lard to a pint of meal, one tea-cup of boiling water; stir well and bake on a hot griddle. Sift in meal one teaspoonful of soda.
Light Bread
Half yeast cake to two quarts of flour, teaspoonful of salt, one dessertspoonful of butter or lard. Dissolve yeast in warm water; make up over night at 10 o'clock; make dough soft and spongy, and set to rise in a warm place. Next morning work the dough over until it becomes perfectly light, adding flour so as to keep it from sticking to the hands, then put to rise in your baking pan, and when it rises bake in a hot oven until thoroughly done.
Fisher, Abby. What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking. Women's Co-operative Printing Office, 1881.
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