Hoe Cake
1 cup cornmeal 1 tablespoon pastry flour 1 cup milk 1/4 cup cream 1 teaspoon salt 1 egg Mix meal, flour, and salt. Heat milk and cream, and when boiling hot pour over meal. Mix well. Separate the egg, stir the yolk into the meal mixture, beat the white stiff, and fold it in last. Drop by spoonfuls on an oiled baking pan, and bake in a hot oven about twenty minutes.
A scalded-meal batter that behaves more like a spoon-dropped biscuit than a griddle cake. The scalding is the whole point: pour the dairy on genuinely boiling hot or the cornmeal stays gritty.
- Oven temperatureA "hot oven" in books of this kind is usually taken as somewhere around 400-450F. Twenty minutes at 425F gives set edges and a soft centre; check at fifteen if your cakes are small.
- Scald properlyBring the milk and cream to a full boil before pouring over the dry meal, and mix at once. Merely warm liquid will not gelatinise the starch, and the cakes will taste raw and sandy.
- Cornmeal choiceUse plain stone-ground yellow or white cornmeal, not self-rising cornmeal mix and not coarse polenta. There is no leavening here at all beyond the beaten egg white, so a mix would change the result entirely.
- Pastry flourOne tablespoon of low-protein pastry flour is doing almost nothing structurally; all-purpose flour is a fine substitute at the same quantity.
- SaltA full teaspoon for one cup of meal is assertive by modern standards, though it suits an unsweetened cake eaten with butter. Half a teaspoon is closer to current taste.
- Fold, then bake at onceThe beaten white is the only lift. Fold it into the meal mixture after it has cooled enough not to cook the egg, and get the pan into the oven immediately.
- The pan"Oiled baking pan" is most likely a greased shallow sheet. A heavy sheet browns the bottoms better than a thin modern tray.
- YieldAbout eight to ten cakes, serving three or four alongside a main dish.