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Batter Cakes of Indian Meal
Make a batter by mixing gradually one quart of boiling water with the same quantity of meal; add a little salt and leave it until nearly cold. Add a little yeast, form into cakes, and prepare in the usual way, that is to say, fried over a clear quick fire. The yolk of an egg is a great improvement to the cakes. Time to fry each cake, five or six minutes. Probable cost, 8d. per pound. Sufficient for six or seven persons.
A scalded cornmeal dough, leavened lightly with yeast and griddled — closer to a johnnycake than to a pourable batter. The one thing to get right is the temperature of the mush before the yeast goes in.
- Cool the mush firstBoiling water is poured onto the meal, and the instruction to leave it "until nearly cold" is not idle. Heat kills yeast somewhere above about 120-130F, so add it only when the mush has come down to blood heat or below; the recipe will still rise.
- Indian mealNineteenth-century British and American books use "Indian meal" for cornmeal, as distinct from oatmeal or wheatmeal. A medium-grind yellow cornmeal is the right substitute.
- Equal quarts, by volumeA quart of water to a quart of meal is measured by volume, not weight. The quart here is the imperial one, about 40 fl oz; cornmeal runs roughly 4 to 5 oz to the cup, so upwards of a pound of meal. The result is a stiff mush you can shape by hand, which is why the recipe says "form into cakes" rather than pour or drop.
- How much yeast"A little yeast" would most likely have meant liquid brewer's barm, weaker than modern dried yeast. Roughly a teaspoon of instant dried yeast, or a comparable amount of fresh, is a reasonable modern equivalent for this quantity of meal.
- The missing rising timeNo proving time is given, and it is not clear one was intended: the recipe goes straight from forming the cakes to frying. If you do prove them, allow perhaps an hour in a warm room; cornmeal has no gluten, so the dough will puff and soften rather than double visibly.
- "The usual way"The recipe glosses this itself: fried over a clear quick fire. In practice that means a griddle or heavy frying pan with a film of dripping, lard or butter over brisk heat. "Fried" here is shallow griddling, not deep frying.
- Five or six minutesThat total is reasonable for a fairly thick cake: two to three minutes a side, turned once. Thinner cakes will be dry and hard by five minutes, so judge by a deep brown crust rather than the clock.
- The egg yolkA single yolk for the full quantity; the recipe does not say at what point it goes in. It adds fat and colour and helps the cakes hold together, cornmeal on its own being crumbly.
- Cost and yield"8d. per pound" is eightpence in pre-decimal currency, a period price note of no practical use now. The recipe says the quantity is sufficient for six or seven persons; it gives no number of cakes.
Cassell's gave maize a place in its dictionary at a moment when Indian corn was cheap and plentiful in Britain — imports of American maize rose sharply after the Corn Laws were repealed in 1846, and the great Irish famine relief shipments, decades before this book, had already made "Indian meal" a household phrase, if not always a welcome one. Cornmeal cakes of this sort, scalded and then leavened, belong to a family of griddle breads found on both sides of the Atlantic: the American johnnycake and hoecake are the closest relatives, and the technique of pouring boiling water over the meal is common to nearly all of them, since it swells the starch and makes an otherwise gritty grain cohere. The yeast is the more genteel touch. The addition of barm and an egg yolk here reflects a book written for kitchens that expected a lighter, more refined result than a plain journey cake.