Home › Breakfast › Indian Meal Griddle Cakes
Indian Meal Griddle Cakes
One quart Indian meal, scald well with boiling water, until it is about the thickness of hasty pudding, one pint wheat flour, one level teaspoon of soda dissolved in a little hot water, two well beaten eggs, a little salt, thin them with sweet milk.
A plain scalded-cornmeal batter of the sort that turned up on American breakfast tables every week in the nineteenth century. Most of the work is in the scalding, and the batter wants resting time before it meets the griddle.
- Indian mealThis is cornmeal, not a spiced flour. Use a medium or fine yellow or white meal; stone-ground gives the best flavour but needs a longer soak to soften.
- The measuresA quart of meal is 4 cups, a pint of flour 2 cups. That is a stiff, meal-heavy batter by modern proportions, and the flour is there mainly to give it enough structure to turn.
- Scalding is the hingePour boiling water over the meal a little at a time, stirring, until it is the consistency of thick porridge; the recipe gives no quantity, so go by feel. Under-scalded meal stays gritty and the cakes taste raw no matter how long they cook. Let the mush cool to lukewarm before the eggs go in, or they will set.
- Hasty puddingThe comparison the recipe relies on: cornmeal boiled in water to a thick, spoonable mush, somewhere between polenta and porridge.
- Soda with sweet milkSweet milk is plain unsoured milk, which gives the soda nothing to react with, so these cakes rise very little. Period cooks often used sour milk or buttermilk here instead, which is what the soda is really for. As written, expect dense, tender, faintly cornbread-like cakes rather than fluffy ones.
- ThinningAdd milk gradually at the end until the batter pours thickly from a ladle but still spreads on its own — the cornmeal keeps drinking liquid, so it will need more milk if it stands.
- Griddle heatA greased griddle over moderate heat. These take longer than wheat pancakes, 3 to 4 minutes a side, and should be turned only once; the edges will look set and dry before the centre is done.
- YieldA full quart of meal makes a great deal — several dozen cakes, enough for a large table. Halve it for a small household.
"Indian meal" was the standard English term for maize meal from the colonial period onward, distinguishing native American corn from "corn" in the older British sense of wheat or grain generally. Cornmeal griddle cakes belong to the same family as johnnycake and hoecake, and they earned their place at breakfast because cornmeal was cheap, kept reasonably well, and cooked into something substantial. The scalding step reflects the coarser grinds of the period: hot water begins gelatinising the starch and softening the hull fragments so the cakes are not sandy. The soda is a marker of date as well — chemical leavening spread through American home kitchens across the middle of the nineteenth century, and by the time books like this one were compiled a level teaspoon of soda dissolved in hot water was an unremarkable line in almost any batter.