Johnny Cake
1¼ cup wheat Flour, 1/2 cup Sugar, 2 or 3 Eggs, 1/3 cup Butter or Lard, 1 cup sour Milk or Buttermilk. 2 cups Indian Meal, 1 heaping teaspoonful Salt, 1 heaping teaspoonful The Great "Arm & Hammer" Soda or Saleratus.
Sift together the flour, Indian meal, salt and Soda. Rub the sugar light with the butter or lard, adding the eggs. Add one half the sour milk or buttermilk and then half the flour and meal. Then add the rest of the milk and the flour. Stir up well; batter should be rather soft; pour into a shallow pan, well buttered and flour dusted and bake in a brisk heat, about 25 to 30 minutes.
A buttermilk cornbread from a soda company's pamphlet, written when "Johnny cake" still meant a baked pan bread rather than a griddle cake. A few of the quantities need a second look before you mix.
- The first measurement"11/4 cup wheat Flour" is most likely a typographic collapse of 1 1/4 cups. With the 2 cups of cornmeal that gives a batter roughly three-fifths meal by volume.
- Indian mealCornmeal, and at this date generally stone-ground and fairly coarse; both white and yellow meal were in common use. Modern fine degerminated meal behaves differently, so the batter may look slacker than the recipe implies; a coarser grind is closer to the original texture.
- Saleratus and sodaBoth names appear because the two words were used more or less interchangeably by cooks of the period. Saleratus originally meant potassium bicarbonate; by this date the word was often used loosely for sodium bicarbonate, which is what "Arm & Hammer" soda was and is. Use plain baking soda.
- Cut the soda backOne cup of buttermilk will neutralize roughly half a teaspoon of soda. A heaping teaspoon leaves a good deal unreacted, which tastes soapy and can turn the crumb yellowish-green. A level half teaspoon of soda plus a teaspoon of baking powder gives the same lift without the aftertaste.
- SaltA heaping teaspoon is defensible across three and a quarter cups of dry ingredients, but taste-check against your butter; if using salted butter, drop to a level teaspoon.
- Brisk heat400 to 425F. At that temperature 25 to 30 minutes suits a batter about an inch deep; a tester should come out clean and the edges pull from the pan.
- Pan and yieldA "shallow pan" here is a 9-inch square or a 9x13 for a thinner, crisper result. Figure eight to twelve squares. Serve warm; cornbread with this much meal goes stale quickly.
- Souring milkIf you have no buttermilk, a tablespoon of vinegar or lemon juice stirred into a cup of whole milk and left ten minutes gives enough acid to react with the soda.
"Johnny cake" is recorded in American English from the eighteenth century and its origin is disputed; it is variously traced to "journey cake" and to "jonakin," and no one derivation is settled. It appears to have begun as a plain meal-and-water bread baked on a board or griddle, and by the time this pamphlet appeared it had acquired eggs, sugar, butter and wheat flour and moved into a pan and an oven. The recipe is plainly promotional: the Arm & Hammer brand belonged to Church & Co., later Church & Dwight, and a sour-milk quick bread makes a natural demonstration piece, since without soda the acid in the buttermilk provides no leavening.