corncob "soda"

donna

Brev. Brig. Gen'l
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Corncob "soda" A substitute for bicarbonate of soda, used in the South during the blockade. It was discovered that corncob ashes, especially from red cobs, possessed the alkaline needed to raise bread. After they were burned and the ashes collected in jars, water was added. A teaspoonful or tablespoonful of this mixture was then used in bread-making,

From The Language of the Civil War by John D. Wright page 72.
 
Corncob "soda" A substitute for bicarbonate of soda, used in the South during the blockade. It was discovered that corncob ashes, especially from red cobs, possessed the alkaline needed to raise bread. After they were burned and the ashes collected in jars, water was added. A teaspoonful or tablespoonful of this mixture was then used in bread-making,

From The Language of the Civil War by John D. Wright page 72.
Has anyone tried that? It would be interesting to know what the bread tasted like.
 
I have been trying to find recipe using corncob soda. I have found mention of a book "What the Slaves ate: recollections of African American foods and foodways" by Herbert C. Covey. He writes : "Letting nothing go to waste, slaves even made use of corn cobs, making soda of the ashes from burnt corn cobs." I am sure there is an old recipe for bread somewhere using corncob soda. Just have to keep looking. it would be great to try it and see how the bread would taste.
 
I think you could just use it in place of regular soda in any period recipe, since it would be a substitute even then, so people would have adapted their old recipes to use it. For example, from the 1863 Confederate Receipt Book here:

Indian Bread.--One quart of butter milk, one quart of corn meal, one quart of coarse flour, one cup of molasses, add a little soda and salt.

or

Soda Biscuit.--One quart of sour milk, one teaspoonful of soda, one of salt, a piece of butter the size of an egg, and flour enough to make them roll out.

The recipes with cream of tartar as the acid would make less sense, since if they couldn't get soda they probably couldn't get cream of tartar either, so they would probably have used more available acids like sour milk or buttermilk.

Depending on how strong-tasting or off-color the ashes were--and I don't know, not having tried it myself--people might gravitate toward the older recipes that used pearlash, which also could be strong-tasting, since those recipes tended to be naturally dark and strongly flavored, like gingerbread, rather than more delicate-tasting like the soda biscuit above. I bet the Indian bread recipe above, with both the molasses and sour milk to counteract the alkaline ashes, would work well.
 
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