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Maize, or Indian Corn
The objection to maize generally is that it requires a great amount of cooking to soften it, and, therefore, gives considerable trouble, the consequence being that an excellent and palatable food is very much neglected. Broken or split maize is known as hominy, and certainly does require rather prolonged stewing. Once, however, it is properly cooked, and tasted with the adjuncts of milk and sugar or jam or treacle, it is generally approved. Ground maize is much more manageable, and appears in many s. In the United States, prepared very much as oatmeal is for porridge, it is known as mush. In Italy it is called polenta and polentina, and is a very favourite dish. Cornflour, marzina, etc., are all preparations of maize starch, and are popular because they can be cooked easily. Polenta, which is the entire yellow meal of maize, is a much more substantial and nourishing fare, and deserves to be better known. Like rice or semolina, it may be cooked either as a sweet or a savoury. A pudding of polenta made with milk, eggs, and sugar, with plenty of raisins in it, well boiled, and then baked, is one children relish amazingly, and it is extremely good for them. Polenta cooked somewhat in the fashion of a Yorkshire pudding and served with grated cheese makes a fine savoury. The famous Johnny-cake of the States is made with fine polenta. Upon one part of this is poured two parts of boiling water. The meal and water are well mixed, made into a thin cake, baked in a quick oven, and eaten hot with treacle.
This is an essay on maize with one workable recipe embedded at the end — the Johnny-cake, given as one part fine cornmeal to two parts boiling water. Everything else here is a suggestion rather than a set of instructions, so the notes below cover both the terms used and what it takes to get the cake right.
- Quick ovenFor the Johnny-cake, read 425-450F (220-230C). A thin cake of scalded meal about half an inch deep will take roughly 20-25 minutes and should be firmly set and browned at the edges.
- The scalding is the hingePouring boiling water onto the meal gelatinises the starch and is what holds the cake together in the absence of egg or raising agent. Use water at a full rolling boil, add it all at once, and beat hard; water merely hot will give a gritty, crumbling cake.
- Polenta versus cornflourThe book's "polenta" simply means whole yellow cornmeal, not a branded product. "Cornflour" in this British text is cornstarch — pure maize starch, not ground whole grain — and "marzina" appears to be one of the proprietary maize-starch preparations sold at the time.
- Fine polenta for the cakeUse a fine or medium yellow cornmeal. Coarse grind, the kind sold for slow-cooked Italian polenta, will not soften enough in a scald and gives a sandy texture.
- Salt and fatThe recipe as printed contains neither. A teaspoon of salt per cup of meal is worth adding, and a spoonful of melted butter or bacon fat worked in appears in many American versions of the period; both improve the texture.
- HominyThe definition given here is the loose British one — broken or split maize. In American usage hominy is maize treated with alkali to remove the hull, and the broken form is grits. Either wants long, slow cooking; modern quick grits do not.
- TreacleBritish treacle, either black treacle or golden syrup depending on the household. Molasses is the closer match for the American original.
- YieldOne cup of cornmeal with two cups of boiling water makes a single modest cake.
- A gap in the textThe line "appears in many s." is a printing fault in the source; the sense is plainly "in many forms" or "in many dishes."
Cassell's is writing for a British audience that had every reason to be suspicious of maize. Large quantities of American Indian meal were shipped into Britain and Ireland in the 1840s as famine relief, and the memory of badly milled, badly cooked, indigestible yellow meal lingered for decades afterwards — which is very much the neglect the writer is arguing against here. The Johnny-cake he describes is the plainest form of an American griddle and hearth bread whose name is traditionally derived either from "journey cake" or from "jonakin"; Rhode Island still spells it jonnycake and still insists on scalded white flint cornmeal. The Italian comparison seems to have had some currency in Victorian dietary writing, where polenta was sometimes invoked to suggest that a whole population could be fed cheaply and well on maize, and the entry's brisk confidence that a boiled-then-baked polenta pudding with raisins is "extremely good for them" belongs to a period when nourishment for children was measured chiefly in starch and milk.