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Johnny or Journey Cakes
Take a pint of Indian meal, mix a little salt with it, and as much boiling water as will form a batter. This will be about half a pint. Beat it well for several minutes, then spread it, to about the eighth of an inch in thickness, on a smooth piece of board. Place the board upright in front of a clear fire, and bake the cake. When well browned, cut it into squares, split these, put butter between, and send them to table as hot as possible. Time, bake until well browned--about twenty minutes. Sufficient for two or three persons.
A two-ingredient cake that depends entirely on technique: scalded cornmeal, spread thin, and cooked by radiant heat. Everything worth saying about it concerns the water and the heat source.
- Indian mealThis is plain cornmeal, and for this batter a fine or medium white or yellow grind works best. Coarse stone-ground meal will stay gritty because the only hydration it gets is one dose of boiling water.
- The pintThis is a British book, so a pint is 20 fluid ounces; measured as dry volume that is roughly 2 1/2 cups of cornmeal, with about 1 1/4 cups boiling water. The ratio matters more than the absolute figures: aim for a stiff, spreadable paste, not a pourable batter.
- Scalding is the hingeThe water must be at a full boil when it goes in. Scalding gelatinises the starch so the paste holds together on a vertical surface without egg or flour; lukewarm water gives a mixture that slumps and crumbles.
- BeatingThe several minutes of beating are not decorative. They develop enough cohesion in the gelatinised meal to let you spread an eighth of an inch of it on a board and stand it upright.
- Replacing the board and open fireWithout a hearth, cook it as a flatbread: spread the paste on a well-greased, preheated cast-iron griddle or heavy skillet over medium heat, or on a preheated baking sheet in a hot oven, about 450F. Either way you want a browned, slightly blistered surface, which is what the fire was providing.
- TimingTwenty minutes applies to a board set beside a fire. On a hot griddle a cake this thin browns in five to eight minutes a side; in a 450F oven allow ten to fifteen minutes. Judge by colour and by the edges lifting.
- ServingIt goes leathery as it cools, which is why the original insists on sending it up as hot as possible. Split, butter and eat immediately. Enough for two or three as a bread course.
Johnny cake, journey cake, hoecake and ashcake are overlapping names for the same simple thing: cornmeal moistened, flattened, and cooked by direct heat rather than in a tin. The form is native to the Americas, taken up by colonists who had wheat only intermittently. "Journey cake" is often said to be the older name, on the grounds that the cakes travelled well in a pocket, while "johnny" is sometimes explained as a corruption of "journey" or of Shawnee; none of these derivations is documented, and all should be treated as folk etymology. The board propped before the fire is the genuinely archaic part of the method: Rhode Island and southern New England cooks used a johnnycake board of oak or maple for exactly this.