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Hancock Corn Cakes
Two coffee cups Indian meal, one coffee cup flour, two and a half coffee cups milk, three eggs, one table spoon melted butter, one tablespoon sugar, one teaspoon soda, dissolved in a little hot water, two teaspoons cream-tarter sifted with the flour and added the last thing. Beat eggs separately, a little salt.
A plain New England griddle batter with a hand-mixed leavening. The original assumes a cook who knows what to do with a bowl of thin batter, so most of what follows is filling in the blanks it leaves.
- Indian mealNineteenth-century American shorthand for cornmeal, as opposed to "meal" from wheat or oats. Use a fine or medium stone-ground meal, white or yellow; coarse polenta grind will stay gritty in a cake this quick.
- Coffee cupsAn inexact vessel, generally reckoned at somewhere between three-quarters of a cup and a full cup. Treating one as 1 cup gives 2 cups cornmeal, 1 cup flour and 2½ cups milk, which is a pourable batter; if yours seems slack, hold back some of the milk rather than adding flour.
- Soda and cream of tartarThis is baking powder assembled by hand, in the correct 1:2 ratio by volume. If you would rather use commercial powder, about 4 teaspoons stands in for the pair, and then skip the hot-water dissolving step.
- The hinge: add the acid lastThe instruction to sift the cream of tartar with the flour "and added the last thing" is the point of the method. Once soda and acid meet in a wet batter they begin gassing at once, so mix and cook without delay; a batter left standing will lose some of its lift.
- Eggs beaten separatelyThe usual reading is that yolks and whites are beaten apart: yolks in with the milk and butter, the whites whipped and folded in at the end. The recipe does not spell this out, but beaten whites help keep a cornmeal cake from being heavy.
- How to cook themThe recipe gives no pan or heat; the name points to a griddle. Cook on a moderately hot griddle in butter or bacon fat, turning when the surface bubbles set. Any temperature figure is a modern addition, not in the original.
- Salt and sugarOne tablespoon of sugar in this quantity is seasoning, not sweetening; "a little salt" is left to the cook, and half to one teaspoon suits modern taste. Neither should be increased if the cakes are going out with butter and syrup.
- YieldRoughly 18 to 20 cakes of four inches, enough for four to six at breakfast. They are best straight off the griddle and go leathery if held.
Corn cakes of this kind sit at the point where American breakfast cookery had cornmeal in one hand and wheat flour in the other: the meal for flavour and cheapness, the flour and beaten eggs to lighten what would otherwise be a dense pone. The dish is also a small record of home chemistry. Before packaged baking powder became universal in American kitchens in the later nineteenth century, cooks bought saleratus or soda and cream of tartar separately and combined them at the bowl, which may go some way to explaining why so many recipes of this period specify the order of addition so carefully. The name is almost certainly a family or place attribution — the name of whoever contributed them, and Hancock is common enough as a surname and as a New England town name that no single origin can be claimed with confidence.