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Johnny Cake
1 egg, 1 cupful of buttermilk or sour milk, 1 tablespoonful of shortening, 1 level teaspoonful of soda, 1 saltspoonful of salt, 2 cupfuls of corn meal, 1 cupful of flour, 1/2 cupful of sugar. Bake twenty minutes to half an hour.
A sweet Northern-style cornbread baked in a pan, despite its place among the griddle cakes. The original gives a time but no temperature or pan, so both need supplying.
- Oven temperatureCornbread of this type wants a fairly hot oven, 400-425F. At that heat the stated twenty minutes to half an hour is right for a shallow pan; test with a skewer in the centre.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. Given the half cup of sugar, a full half teaspoon of salt suits modern palates better.
- PanNo pan is specified. This quantity of batter fills an 8-inch square tin or a 9-inch cast-iron skillet to about an inch deep. Grease it well and, if using iron, heat it in the oven first for a crisp bottom crust.
- ShorteningAt this period the word generally meant lard, or a lard-and-butter blend. Melted butter or a neutral oil works; melt it and add it with the buttermilk so it disperses rather than seizing in the cold liquid.
- Soda and sour milkThe single level teaspoon of soda is doing all the lifting, activated by the acid in the buttermilk. Combine wet and dry only when the oven is up to heat and get the batter in promptly, since the gas begins escaping at once.
- Corn mealUse plain stone-ground yellow or white cornmeal, not the self-rising mixes sold in the American South, which already contain leavening and salt. Fine or medium grind gives a tenderer crumb than coarse.
- YieldAbout nine squares, or eight wedges from a skillet. Best warm, within an hour of baking; cornbread this lean in fat stales quickly.
Johnny cake is one of the oldest names in American cookery, applied over three centuries to everything from a plain cornmeal-and-water cake baked on a board before the fire to the sweetened, egg-and-milk batter cake here. The name is generally traced either to "journey cake," a bread that traveled well, or to "jonakin," a New England word of uncertain origin; neither derivation is settled. Baked in the oven and enriched like this, it shows how far the dish had drifted from its hearthside original -- and the half cupful of sugar and cupful of wheat flour mark it as a Northern version. Rhode Island cooks, and many Southern ones, kept to unsweetened all-cornmeal jonnycakes and pones.