Dodgers
1 cup corn meal 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 cup boiling water 1 teaspoon butter Scald the corn meal with water, beat until smooth and cook one hour in double boiler, add butter. Drop by spoonfuls on a buttered griddle, pat them flat, put a dot of butter on each before turning. They are good accompaniment to boiled ham. May be used for a winter breakfast cooked in a frying pan after sausage or bacon.
A plain corn mush griddle cake from the era when cornmeal was cooked long and slow. The hour in the double boiler is the whole point of the recipe, not a formality.
- The long cook is the hingeScalded meal that is only briefly cooked stays gritty and falls apart on the griddle. An hour over simmering water hydrates the starch fully so the mush holds together when patted flat and turned.
- Cornmeal then and nowHousehold meal of this period was often stone-ground and coarser than modern degerminated supermarket cornmeal, though roller-milled degerminated meal was also on sale. Coarse or stone-ground white or yellow meal gives the intended texture; fine instant polenta will set much stiffer and faster.
- Consistency checkEqual parts meal and water makes a very stiff mush. If it is too thick to beat smooth after scalding, add boiling water a spoonful at a time; you want something that drops from a spoon, not a dough.
- Double boilerAny heatproof bowl set over a pan of barely simmering water works. Direct heat scorches this mixture quickly and needs near-constant stirring.
- Griddle heatThe recipe gives no temperature; medium heat is the aim. These are already cooked through, so the griddle is only building a crust; too hot and the outside browns before the inside warms.
- Cooking in the sausage panThe suggestion to fry them in the fat left from sausage or bacon is worth taking. The rendered fat browns and seasons them in a way butter alone does not.
- YieldAbout eight to ten small cakes, enough for two or three at breakfast.
- Make aheadThe cooked mush keeps several days covered in the refrigerator and firms up considerably, which makes it easier to shape into flat cakes before frying.
"Dodger" is an old American name for a small cake of cornmeal, and it turns up in cookbooks alongside corn pone, hoecake and johnnycake, the whole family of unleavened meal breads cooked on a griddle, a hoe blade or the hearth. The word is usually traced to the sense of a lump or wad rather than to any particular cook or place. What distinguishes this version is that the meal is cooked to a mush first. Gold Medal's book, published by the Washburn-Crosby milling company, was in the business of selling wheat flour, so a purely cornmeal recipe is a small acknowledgement that corn breads were still an everyday part of the American breakfast table, particularly as a way to use the fat and the hot pan left from the morning's ham, bacon or sausage.