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Johnny Cake Without Eggs (Bachelors' Recipe)
2 cups cornmeal 1 cup Five Roses flour 2 cups sweet milk 2 tablespoons melted butter 2 tablespoons sugar 2 tablespoons baking powder. -Earl C. Tweedie, Macklin, Sask.
The book gives the ingredients and trusts the cook to know the rest, which was normal for reader-contributed pages. Here is what the list leaves out.
- No method is givenWhisk the dry ingredients together, stir in the milk and melted butter, and pour into a greased 9-inch square pan or a 10-inch cast-iron skillet. Bake at 425F for 22-28 minutes, until the top is set and a tester comes out clean.
- The baking powder is too muchThe baking powder is high -- Two tablespoons for three cups of dry ingredients is roughly double modern practice and can leave a soapy, metallic aftertaste. Use 1 tablespoon, or 4 teaspoons if you want a very open crumb. Baking powders of the period are often said to have been weaker and less uniform, which may be part of why old recipes call for so much.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh whole milk, specified to distinguish it from the sour milk or buttermilk used in soda-leavened batters. Whole milk is the right substitution; skim gives a drier cake.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian all-purpose white flour, hard-wheat and fairly strong. Ordinary all-purpose works.
- Cornmeal grindCornmeal of the period was often more coarsely ground and thirstier than today's fine degerminated meal. If your meal is fine, the batter will look thin at first; let it stand five minutes before baking and it will thicken.
- SaltNone is listed, and the cake tastes flat without it. Half a teaspoon of salt is the minimum for this quantity.
- No eggs, as promisedWithout eggs the crumb is more crumbly and the cake stales quickly. Serve it warm, straight from the pan, with butter.
- YieldOne 9-inch pan, cutting into nine generous squares.
Johnny cake one of the oldest continuously baked things in North America, a plain cornmeal bread whose name is generally traced to journey cake, though the etymology has never been settled. The Five Roses book was assembled from recipes mailed in by Canadian housewives and, as here, the occasional man with their names and towns printed alongside; Macklin sits on the Saskatchewan Alberta border, homestead country in the years this book was circulating. The bachelors' recipe label is doing real work: it signals a batter that needs no eggs, no creaming, no rubbing in of fat, and no judgment beyond stirring and pouring, which is exactly what a man cooking for himself on a prairie farm wanted. Cornmeal breads leavened with chemical baking powder rather than yeast or sour milk became the standard quick bread of the period once commercial powders were cheap and reliable enough to keep in the cupboard.