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Johnny Cake (No. 2)
Mix 3 cups buttermilk with 2 small teaspoons soda, 1 cup sugar, 2 eggs and 1 teaspoon salt. Add 3 cups cornmeal, 1½ cups Five Roses flour and 1 teaspoon cream tartar sifted with the flour. Heat 3 tablespoons shortening in baking pan and pour boiling hot over all. Beat well.
Bake in hot oven.
A large, sweet, buttermilk-raised cornbread of the Canadian sort, thinned with enough liquid to pour. The hinge is the hot fat: it is heated in the pan, poured into the batter, and the batter goes straight back into that greased hot pan.
- Hot oven"Hot oven" in books of this period generally means somewhere in the 400-450F range; 425F is a safe middle. Bake 25-35 minutes depending on pan depth, until the centre springs back and a skewer comes out clean.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard-wheat all-purpose flour. Ordinary all-purpose flour is the direct substitute; bread flour will make it tougher than intended.
- CornmealUse medium-grind yellow cornmeal, not corn flour and not degerminated instant polenta. Coarse stone-ground meal works but benefits from sitting in the buttermilk ten minutes before the flour goes in.
- Soda and cream of tartarThree cups of buttermilk carry plenty of acid, so two teaspoons of soda plus cream of tartar is generous leavening by modern standards. If the finish tastes faintly soapy or the crumb is orange-tinged, cut the soda to a rounded teaspoon and a half next time.
- "Small teaspoons"Old measure language, most likely meaning a scant or level spoonful rather than a heaped one. Measure level and do not round up.
- ShorteningLard, bacon fat or vegetable shortening all suit; butter will brown and can scorch in a pan that hot. Heat the pan with the fat in the oven while you mix, then pour the sizzling fat into the batter, beat, and return the batter to the hot pan for the crisp edge that is the point of the method.
- Pan and yieldThis is a big batch: roughly 13x9 inches, or two 9-inch square pans. It gives about 15 generous squares.
- SweetnessA full cup of sugar puts this at the sweet, cake-like end of the cornbread range, closer to a tea bread eaten with butter than to a plain cornbread for beans or greens; halve the sugar if you want it savoury.
Johnny cake is one of the oldest names in North American baking, generally traced to the cornmeal breads of the eastern seaboard, and the origin of the name is disputed -- it is variously explained as a corruption of "journey cake" or of "jonakin," both explanations traditional rather than documented. By the time the Five Roses book was assembled by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company for Canadian home bakers, the dish had drifted a long way from a plain griddle-baked meal-and-water cake: this version is sweetened, egged, raised with soda and buttermilk, and cut with a good deal of wheat flour, which is what a flour miller's promotional cookbook would be expected to encourage.