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Corn Cakes (Three pints of Indian meal one)
Three pints of Indian meal, one quart boiling water, a little over half a pint of cold water, five eggs, a small pinch salt, half a tea cup sugar. After the meal is well scalded with the poiling water and when a little cool add the yolks of eggs, well beaten, then the cold water. Beat the whites of the eggs to a stiff froth, and add, stirring well through. Bake in very hot gem pans, in a hot oven, about half an hour. No baking powder or soda re quired in this receipt. (Splendid).
A batter leavened entirely by beaten egg white, which makes the handling of the whites the whole recipe. Everything else is scalded cornmeal.
- Indian mealThis is plain cornmeal, yellow or white, stone-ground if you can get it. Nothing self-rising and nothing degerminated-and-enriched will behave quite the same; a medium grind gives the best texture here.
- The measuresThree pints of meal is 6 cups, roughly 1 lb 12 oz. A quart of boiling water is 4 cups, and "a little over half a pint" of cold water is just over 1 cup. Half a teacup of sugar is somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 cup — the nineteenth-century teacup runs smaller than a modern measuring cup.
- Scald properly, then waitPour the boiling water over the meal all at once and beat it smooth; this gelatinizes the starch and is what holds the cakes together without flour. Let it cool to warm before the yolks go in, or you will scramble them.
- Fold, do not stirThe recipe says "stirring well through," but the whites are the only leavening in the pan. Fold them in with a spatula in two additions and get the batter into the oven immediately — there is no chemical rise waiting in reserve.
- Gem pansCast-iron gem pans are close kin to the modern muffin tin. Grease them well and heat them empty in the oven until the fat shimmers, then fill; the hot metal is what gives the crisp shell this batter depends on.
- A hot ovenIn period terms that is somewhere around 400–450°F. At 30 minutes the cakes should be deeply browned and firm; smaller modern muffin cups will be done sooner, so check early.
- YieldThis is a large batch; the quantities run to well over two quarts of batter, so expect three dozen or more cakes depending on pan size. They are at their best within the hour and go leathery cold — split and toast any that survive to the next morning.
"Indian meal" was the standard American term for maize meal well into the twentieth century, and it survives in the name Indian pudding. The scalding step in this receipt is older than baking powder: pouring boiling water over cornmeal swells the starch and gives the batter body, a technique carried over from mush and johnnycake, and the cook's closing note that "no baking powder or soda" is required reads as a small boast at a moment when commercial chemical leaveners were cheap and widely available. Gem pans — heavy cast-iron trays of small deep cups, sold by the stove foundries from the second half of the nineteenth century — were a fixture of the American breakfast table, and many nineteenth-century "gems" are simply this kind of batter baked hot and fast. The parenthetical "(Splendid)" suggests a compiled community cookbook, where contributors' own verdicts were often printed with their recipes.