Welcome back to Mid-Century Menu, where this week we are making cornbread with condensed soup in it.
This is Corn Bread! Exciting, exciting corn bread.
AuthorRetroRuth
From Soup Cookery The Savory Heinz Way, 1955
Tested Recipe!
[cooked-sharing]
Heat oven to 425 degrees.
Sift together the first 5 ingredients. Combine remaining ingredients; mix well. Add to dry ingredients, mixing just long enough to moisten.
Fill greased muffin tins ⅔ full or pour into greased 9 x 9 square pan. Bake at 425 degrees for 25 minutes or until done.
Ingredients
Directions
Heat oven to 425 degrees.
Sift together the first 5 ingredients. Combine remaining ingredients; mix well. Add to dry ingredients, mixing just long enough to moisten.
Fill greased muffin tins ⅔ full or pour into greased 9 x 9 square pan. Bake at 425 degrees for 25 minutes or until done.
Notes
This recipe is, unsurprisingly, from Soup Cookery The Savory Heinz Way, from 1955. Which is a whole pamphlet about how to get as much condensed soup into your family as possible. Not to say that these recipes are bad, just that they use a lot of soup. Like the recipe I tested. A whole can of soup? A whole can.
Anyway, I suppose before we get started on this, I should confess that I’m really not big on savory cornbread.
I’m not sure what my deal is, but I just like sweet cornbread better. I especially like pancakes or griddle cakes made with cornmeal and served with lots of butter and maple syrup. Yum.
So, I’m not exactly sure why I picked this. Probably because I was curious to see what exactly a whole can of undiluted cream of chicken soup would do to a 9×9 pan of cornbread.
So far, all it did was make it violently yellow and smell of soup.
Pretty much the same after baking as well. It also didn’t rise very much, which makes me wonder how much baking powder is needed to make condensed soup actually rise.
“So what weird thing is in this? Pineapple?”
“Pineapple would be a blessing.”
“Great.”
“Did you figure it out?”
“Totally. It’s cream of chicken soup.”
”You can taste it?”
“It’s all I can taste. It tastes like I licked the lid of the condensed soup can.”
The Verdict: Unquestionably Cream Of Chicken Soup
From The Tasting Notes –
If you like the taste of cream of chicken soup, then this is a winner. It didn’t really taste like cornbread at all, just textured cream of chicken soup. Not that it was bad, it just wasn’t much of a cornbread. It would be great with gravy for a quick meal, like sausage gravy or red eye gravy, in place of biscuits. But I wouldn’t just butter a piece and eat it just for fun. It would have to be a vehicle to get something more delicious than itself into my mouth. Overall not bad, if you really, really like soup.
And I can’t decide if this is better or worse than this recipe.
Can’t say I’m rushing to try this one, but it certainly reminds me of my grandmother, who made a similar recipe but using creamed corn instead of the cream soup. Now *that* was a winner!
Just. No.
Never.
Ever.
On either count.
Hey Ruth…Northern-style cornbread, or Southern-style. Because, you know…(that was the important question I came up with from reading this. I think I have an automatic editing function when is mentioned, due to some of the horrors produced by my grandmother when we were young. To this day, I am not able to buy at the store, or to make the only good things (green bean casserole and chicken and rice) that she made with the . It’s a mystery to me. I’ve even asked my older sister (poor thing, she remembers even more of our grandmother’s cooking about the and she’s responded with “what is ? What’s that for?”)
I can see the origins of where it comes from in the recipe. It reads like someone used the fond from a roasted chicken to make a cream gravy and decided to use it for the liquid in their cornbread instead. flashforward a couple generations… hey.. do you think it would make a difference if we used a can for grandmas cornbread?
Answer: yes, yes it does.
As for finding out if it’s better or worse than the “Soup Cakes”, well, there’s only one way to find out…
oh man! Now I want to make corn bread with chunks of pineapple in it. But only if Tom tastes it.
I have a cookbook from the 40s or early 50s that has a whole section on mixing different flavored cans of soup together. And some of the combos are really weird and they don’t even make some of those flavors any more.
Just as strange as this.
I’ve used creamed corn while making cornbread, makes for an interesting texture.
I wonder if a different soup flavor (or using less soup) would make this less disgusting. Probably not. *shudder* 😉
Southern cornbread is savory. Yankee cornbread is sweet.
As a vegetarian from Mississippi, I can assure you that I wouldn’t be touching this one. However, I do sometimes add creamed corn to my cornbread if there’s a little leftover.
Great tom face! I actually laughed out loud 😀
I prefer savory cornbread myself, but this sounded pretty dubious to me right away.