Johnny Cake
4 cups corn meal 1 teaspoon salt 2 tablespoons molasses 3 cups buttermilk 2 teaspoons soda 2 eggs This rule calls for water milled corn meal. The usual kiln dried meal makes a different quality and the proportions should be 3 cups of meal and 1 of flour. Mix and sift the dry ingredients, add the buttermilk and molasses slowly; add the beaten eggs and beat all together for two minutes with a broad wooden spoon. Bake in two pans for one-half hour in a moderate oven.
A plain buttermilk cornbread from the era when the type of meal you bought mattered more than the recipe. The note about water-milled versus kiln-dried meal is the important part, not an aside.
- Water-milled mealWater-milled (stone-ground) meal is coarser and still carries the germ, and the book treats it as the meal the full 4 cups are calculated for. Ordinary supermarket cornmeal is the "kiln dried" sort the book warns about: use 3 cups cornmeal plus 1 cup all-purpose flour as instructed.
- Moderate ovenGenerally read as 350-375F. Half an hour, as the recipe directs, suits two 8-inch pans. Done when the center springs back and the edges have pulled from the pan.
- Soda and buttermilkThe 2 teaspoons of soda are neutralized by the acid in the buttermilk, and there is no baking powder as backup. Use real cultured buttermilk, sift the soda thoroughly through the dry ingredients so it does not streak, and get the batter into the oven promptly once the liquid goes in.
- MolassesUnsulphured baking molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter at this proportion. Two tablespoons is for color and a faint sweetness, not a sweet cornbread; this is a bread meant to be eaten with butter alongside dinner.
- The two-minute beatingThe two-minute beating is unusual for a quick bread, and it works here because a batter that is largely cornmeal has little gluten to toughen.
- PansTwo 8-inch round or square pans, well greased, batter about an inch deep.
- YieldTwo pans, serving 8 to 12. Best within an hour of baking; it stales quickly.
"Johnny cake" appears across New England and the mid-Atlantic from the eighteenth century onward, and the name's origin is genuinely unsettled -- often said to be a corruption of "journey cake" or of "Shawnee cake," though neither derivation is documented. Strictly, Rhode Island jonnycakes are thin griddle cakes of white flint cornmeal and water; what appears here is a pan-baked version leavened with soda and buttermilk. The fussy note about milling reflects a real shift: by the early twentieth century roller mills and kiln drying had displaced much local water milling, and the book supplies a wheat-flour correction for the commercial product.