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Corn Dodger
Take a scant quart of meal, one teaspoonful of soda, half as much salt, and a pint of buttermilk; mix well and bake in a moderately heated oven.
A four-ingredient quick bread with no fat, no egg and no wheat — the leanest member of the cornbread family. Success hinges on the stiffness of the dough and a hot, well-greased pan.
- "Meal" means cornmealUnqualified "meal" in recipes of this kind is cornmeal, and for dodgers it was often white and water-ground, though the recipe does not specify. Stone-ground meal absorbs more liquid than modern degerminated supermarket meal, so hold back a little of the buttermilk until you see how the dough behaves.
- The measuresA scant quart of cornmeal is a little under 4 cups; a pint of buttermilk is 2 cups. Half a teaspoonful of salt is on the low side by current taste — a full teaspoon is not out of place.
- This is a dough, not a batterTwo cups of liquid to nearly four of meal gives a stiff mass. The recipe gives no shaping direction, but dodgers were customarily formed by hand into small oblong cakes. If the mixture pours, it is a batter bread and will spread flat instead of forming the thick crust that defines a dodger.
- Oven temperature"Moderately heated" is usually taken as somewhere around 350-375F; at that heat expect roughly 30 to 35 minutes. Starting them in a heavy skillet or pan preheated with fat before dropping the heat will give a better crust, though the recipe says nothing of this.
- Grease the pan even though the recipe has no fatThere is no shortening in the dough at all, so a dry pan will weld the dodgers to it. A cast-iron skillet or sheet slicked with bacon drippings, heated before the dough goes on, is traditional and gives the browned underside.
- Buttermilk and sodaThe soda is there only to react with the acid in the buttermilk, so mix and get the cakes into the oven promptly. Modern cultured buttermilk is acidic enough to do the job; if you substitute sweet milk, the soda has nothing to work on and the bread will taste flat and faintly soapy.
- Yield and servingPerhaps ten to twelve dodgers, depending on the size you shape them. They are meant to be eaten hot with butter, or dropped into pot likker, greens or a bowl of beans, which is where their density becomes a virtue rather than a fault.
Corn dodgers belong to the plain cornbread tradition of the American South and the Ohio Valley, where cornmeal was the everyday grain and wheat flour a purchase rather than a given. The name is usually traced to the sense of dodge as a lump or small shaped mass, though the derivation is traditional rather than documented; much the same dough was often said to become a hoecake when baked flat on a griddle and a pone when baked in a loaf, though the usage was loose. What distinguishes the dodger is that it is hand-shaped and hard-crusted, sturdy enough to carry in a pocket or a saddlebag, which is why it turns up so often in accounts of travel, field work and army rations in the nineteenth century. Its appearance in a general-purpose household book, alongside yeast breads and rolls, shows how thoroughly cornmeal bread had settled into the ordinary domestic repertoire — a recipe short enough to print in a single sentence.