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Indian Meal Johnny Cakes
Make into a firm dough one quart of Indian meal, using as much warm water as may be required, and a little salt. Scoop out some of the meal from the centre, pour in the water, and mix in the usual way. Knead the dough, and roll it to about an inch in thickness. Lay the cake on a well-buttered griddle over a clear brisk fire, and toast it on both sides. When done, serve at once, split and buttered. This is a favourite American cake, eaten with fried bacon.
A plain water-and-cornmeal griddle bread with no leavening and no fat in the dough, which makes the handling of the meal and the heat of the griddle the whole of the recipe.
- Indian meal is cornmealThe term meant maize meal throughout the nineteenth century, in contrast to wheat "flour". Use a fine or medium stone-ground yellow or white cornmeal; degerminated supermarket meal works but gives a drier, blander cake.
- A quart of mealMeasured dry by volume, roughly 4 cups, about 1 lb 2 oz. It will take somewhere near 2 to 2 1/2 cups of water, but cornmeals vary widely in absorbency, so add the water gradually rather than trusting a fixed figure.
- Use water hot enough to scaldWater temperature matters -- The recipe says only "warm water", but cornmeal has no gluten, and hot water swells the starch and helps the dough hold together; scalding the meal is a common practice for this reason. Cold or lukewarm water gives a mixture more likely to crumble when it is turned.
- Rest the doughNot in the original, but give the mixed dough ten minutes covered before shaping. The meal continues to absorb, and a dough that seemed slack will stiffen into something that rolls.
- An inch is thickAt that depth the centre is slow to cook and can stay doughy while the crust colours. Half an inch is more workable, and cutting the sheet into rounds or squares three or four inches across makes turning far easier than moving one large cake.
- "A clear brisk fire"A clear fire is one burnt down clean, without smoke or flame; brisk implies a lively, fairly strong heat rather than the fiercest fire you can raise. On a modern hob, medium to medium-high; allow roughly 8 to 10 minutes a side for a half-inch cake, until deep gold and firm at the centre.
- No raising agentSome American books of the same era give johnnycakes raised with soda and sour milk or buttermilk, but this version is unleavened. Expect a dense, close-grained cake rather than anything cakey; it is closer to a flatbread.
- Yield and servingA quart of meal makes enough for six to eight, and the cakes are best split and buttered straight off the griddle. They stiffen badly as they cool, so cook them in batches as they are wanted.
Johnnycake belongs to the long line of maize breads that colonists in North America learned from Native cooks and then made their own, surviving in New England and Rhode Island as a griddle cake of meal, salt and scalding water and very little else. The name's origin is disputed: it has been variously traced to "journey cake", to "jonakin" or "jannock", and to "Shawnee cake", none of these documented well enough to settle the matter. Its appearance in an English dictionary of cookery, flagged as "a favourite American cake, eaten with fried bacon", is characteristic of Cassell's, which gathered colonial and foreign dishes as curiosities for British readers. The pairing with bacon is the honest one: a sugarless, plain bread of this kind was built to be eaten with something rich.