Yellow Bread 317 



fruit: apples, blueberries, cranberries or beach plums. One of 

 these fruit stews served with corn dumplings and rich cream 

 is called a "grunt." The name is no mystery. 



Pones, dodgers and hoecake are cabin foods. But every 

 quality child born in the South has stolen away from the Big 

 House to eat these in the servants' cabins, and to wonder 

 why he didn't have them on his mother's table. 



Spoon bread is a quality dish, however. Really, this is not a 

 bread, but a souffle of eggs, butter, milk and corn meal. Let 

 those who turn up their eyes in ecstasy at mention of a cheese 

 souffle as this is served at the Tour d'Argent, try Miss Mary 

 Maconochie's Southern spoon bread. It is made from a rule 

 she brought from one of those big, square quiet houses that 

 border Court House Square in Frederick, Maryland. She made 

 it for me, and we ate it in the walled garden behind a house 

 on East Sixtieth Street in New York on an evening when the 

 full moon rose over Queensboro Bridge and when the radio 

 blared the news of Germany's march on Poland. But the spoon 

 bread triumphed over the heat and the city and the interna- 

 tional situation. It is one of the few things in the world that 

 can do that. 



This is how Miss Maconochie makes it: First she pours a 

 quart of milk into a double boiler and brings this to a boil. 

 In this she melts an "egg" of butter. Then she pours the 

 boiling milk slowly over two cups of white water-ground corn 

 meal to which has been added one teaspoon of salt. 



After this it is time to take the bowl and sit down by the 

 kitchen window and stir, and stir and stir. Fifteen minutes of 

 stirring isn't too much, according to Maryland standards. 



The yolks of two eggs, well beaten, are then put into the 

 batter, and lastly, the stiffly beaten whites. The batter is 

 poured into a buttered and warmed earthenware dish and 

 clapped instantly into a hot oven, to bake "a good thirty 

 minutes." 



Like all souffles, spoon bread must be eaten the minute it 



