Home › Baking Powder Breads › Corn Cakes
Corn Cakes
Put a pint of meal in a bowl, mix through it a teaspoon of salt and pour over it enough fiercely boiling water just to moisten the mass; cover for five minutes or an hour, as convenient. Beat three eggs separately, add a cup of sweet milk to the yolks and pour over the scalded meal; mix well, add a teaspoon of baking powder or one-fourth of a teaspoon of soda and the beaten whites size of walnut, one teaspoon of soda in the milk, and enough graham flour to thicken like cake. Steam three hours; start over cold water. - Mrs Orville Goren.
This entry is one of the more confused in the book: it begins as a batter for griddle cakes and ends with instructions for a steamed pudding-style bread, and at least one line appears to have been set in type twice. Read the whole thing before starting and decide which of the two dishes you mean to make.
- The text has collidedThe line runs off the rails at "size of walnut": that phrase normally describes a lump of butter or lard, not egg whites, and the "one teaspoon of soda in the milk" that follows duplicates the leavening already called for a few words earlier. The beaten whites themselves do belong here, since three eggs were beaten separately at the start. Choose one leavening (a teaspoon of baking powder is the safer reading) and ignore the other.
- A pint of mealTwo cups of cornmeal by volume, roughly 9 oz. "Meal" here means cornmeal, yellow or white; period meal was often coarser than most supermarket meal today.
- Sweet milkPlain fresh whole milk, named to distinguish it from the soured or buttermilk that period recipes call for elsewhere. No sugar is involved.
- Graham flourCoarse whole-wheat flour, the whole kernel ground without sifting out bran or germ. Modern whole-wheat flour is the nearest thing; it absorbs liquid faster, so add it gradually and stop when the batter mounds on the spoon.
- The scald is the pointFiercely boiling water gelatinizes the starch and softens the bran in the meal, which is what keeps the finished cakes tender rather than gritty. Use just enough to dampen the meal through — a wet slurry defeats it. Five minutes is enough; an hour does no harm.
- If you steam itGrease a mold or coffee tin, fill it two-thirds full to allow rise, cover tightly, and set it on a rack in a covered pot with water partway up the sides. "Start over cold water" means bring the water up with the pudding already in place, so the leavening works as the batter warms. Three hours is right for a full-sized mold; test with a skewer.
- If you make cakes insteadThin the batter with milk until it pours, and bake on a griddle at medium-high, about two minutes a side. Two cups of meal gives roughly a dozen to sixteen cakes.
- Beaten whitesFold them in last and briefly, whichever version you make. They are doing structural work here alongside the chemical leavening, and stirring them down wastes the effort.
Chemical leavening was still the newer technology in the American kitchen of the late nineteenth century. The scalding of cornmeal with boiling water before mixing is much older than baking powder and New England cornbread. Long steaming over water, likewise, is often said to belong to an era when a reliable oven was not something every cook had; a covered mold in a pot of simmering water gave an even, damp heat that a wood range's oven could not be trusted to match. The recipe's attribution to Mrs Orville Goren is typical of these community-gathered volumes, which collected contributions by name and printed them with little editing — which is very likely how two separate recipes came to be run together here.