Breakfast Corn Bread

History

This recipe is Abby Fisher's "Breakfast Corn Bread," printed as recipe number 7 in her 1881 book, "What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking, Soups, Pickles, Preserves, Etc.," published in San Francisco. It is a batter bread that binds two Southern kitchen staples: cooked rice and corn meal. As printed, it calls for "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 authority here is Abby Fisher's own. She was born in June 1831 in Orangeburg, South Carolina, to Abbie Clifton; genealogical research in San Francisco records identifies her father as James J. Andrews, an Orangeburg planter who held some seventy people in slavery, and an 1869 receipt from the Freedman's Savings and Trust in Mobile records her under her mother's name. Before 1865, censuses recorded only an enslaver's name with the age and sex of those he held, so no surviving record names Fisher herself; Karen Hess, who rediscovered her book, noted that absence of documentation. She later lived in Mobile, Alabama, and reached San Francisco after 1877. Because she could neither read nor write, she dictated her recipes, which were set down with the help of friends and patrons. In her own preface she described the book as drawn "based on an experience of upwards of thirty-five years" in Southern cooking, and signed it "MRS. ABBY FISHER, Late of Mobile, Ala." Her cooking and preserving had already been recognized: she won a diploma at the Sacramento State Fair in 1879 and two medals at the San Francisco Mechanics' Institute Fair in 1880.

The book is one of the earliest known cookbooks by an African American author — the second known cookbook by a Black woman in the United States, after Malinda Russell's "Domestic Cook Book" of 1866. The historical record does not document a specific earlier origin for this particular rice-and-corn-meal breakfast bread; what is documented is that Abby Fisher set it down in her own name, out of decades of her own practice, in this book.

Ingredients

• 1 teacup rice
• 1.5 teacup corn meal
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 tablespoon lard or butter
• 3 eggs
• 0.5 teacup sweet milk

Instructions

1. Boil the rice until very soft.
2. Mix the hot rice into the corn meal until well combined.
3. Stir the whole mixture until light.
4. Add the salt, lard or butter, eggs, and sweet milk, stirring to blend thoroughly.
5. Pour the batter into either muffin cups or a baking pan.
6. Bake until golden and cooked through.