Hoe Cake
4 cups white corn meal 1 teaspoon salt Boiling water Mix salt and meal, add boiling water to make a stiff batter. Moisten hands in cold water. Take a tablespoon of the batter in your hand and press it into a thin round cake. If you have an open fire, have before it an oak plank, well heated. Place the cakes on the board in front of the fire. Bake on one side and turn and bake on the other until thoroughly done, about three-quarters of an hour. These can also be baked on a griddle on top of the fire. When done pull apart, butter and send to the table hot. Good.--Mrs. Rorer. Thin Corn Cake, called "Splits." 1 cup yellow corn meal 1/4 teaspoon salt 2 tablespoons melted butter 1 1/2 cups boiling water 1 teaspoon sugar Mix and sift the dry ingredients, scald with the boiling water and beat thoroughly. Add the butter and when well mixed spread very thin on buttered tin sheets. Bake slowly about twenty minutes. Pull apart and butter while hot.
Two related cornmeal breads: a hearth-baked hoe cake and a thin oven-baked "split." Both depend on scalding the meal with boiling water, which is the step that makes them hold together without egg or leavening.
- The hinge: truly boiling waterThe water must be at a rolling boil when it hits the meal (for the splits, the recipe adds that the scalded mixture is then beaten thoroughly). Scalding gelatinizes the starch so the cakes bind; lukewarm water gives a crumbly mixture that falls apart on the griddle.
- White corn mealWhite meal was the usual Southern choice, and softer, fine-ground white meal is the likeliest reading of what was meant here. A coarse, grits-type meal of either colour will take more water and longer standing.
- "Stiff batter" means doughFour cups of meal will take roughly 3 to 3 1/2 cups boiling water, but add it gradually. The mass should be shapeable by hand, not pourable. Let it stand five minutes before shaping so the meal fully absorbs.
- No open fire, no oak plankThe plank in front of the fire is a radiant-heat method. A heavy cast-iron griddle or skillet over medium heat, lightly greased, does the same job: about 6 to 8 minutes a side for cakes a quarter-inch thick, until deep gold and firm.
- That three-quarters of an hourThe 45 minutes applies only to plank baking, where the cakes cook slowly by reflected heat. On a griddle they are done in a fraction of that; cooking them 45 minutes on iron will produce charcoal.
- "Bake slowly" for the splitsThe book gives no temperature; a slow oven in modern terms is somewhere near 300-325F, but that is an inference. Spread the batter no more than an eighth of an inch thick on a buttered sheet, as the recipe directs; twenty minutes should dry and crisp it without browning much.
- Serve at onceBoth breads are unleavened apart from the steam in them (the splits do carry melted butter, the hoe cakes none). They toughen as they cool, so split, butter and eat them straight off the heat as the recipe directs.
Hoe cake is one of the oldest breads in the American repertoire, a direct descendant of the plain cornmeal-and-water cakes cooked on hot stones, boards and iron in Native American and early colonial kitchens. The name is generally traced to the practice of baking the cakes on the flat blade of a field hoe, though the ash-cake, journey cake and johnnycake all belong to the same family and the terms slide into one another by region. The attribution here is to Sarah Tyson Rorer, principal of the Philadelphia Cooking School and one of the most widely read American cookery writers of the 1890s and 1900s, whose recipes were frequently reprinted in promotional cook books. That a recipe still specifying an oak plank before an open fire was printed alongside a griddle alternative suggests the hearth method was already more memory than instruction for many of its readers.