This recipe was featured on our social media series "Flavors of the Mountain Past." It is from Sarah Rutledge’s The Carolina Housewife (1847), a collection of nearly 550 recipes prominent in mid-19th century Charleston.
Camp corn bread is a basic corn bread recipe that many mountain folk would have made in their homes due to its simplicity and the abundance of corn in Western North Carolina. To make the corn bread, they’d use a Dutch oven that sat over a fire, which would typically burn all day for the various meals they’d cook. Corn bread was such a common recipe that many variations came out of it. Some include Owendaw corn bread, Chicora corn bread, Alexander’s corn bread, and Accabee corn bread. Many of these variations are influenced by African American and Native American recipes.
Note how the instructions may appear vague, such as “let it remain for some hours in this state” and not specifying the amount of corn meal needed. Nineteenth-century women dominated the household duties, meaning that they cooked meals for their families nearly every day. Many women would learn traditional cooking methods from their mothers, grandmothers, and sisters. So, women didn’t need specific instructions to make a recipe they’d watched their family members cook for years.