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Baking-Powder Breads: Johnny
In New England it takes the form best known as the Rhode Island Johnny Cake. In the South it forms the celebrated Hoe Cake or Corn Pone. In all parts of the country corn meal bread, muffins, and batter cakes are cooked and served according to a great variety of recipes. The following have been selected as typical of the various corn meal breads in use in different parts of the United States as recorded by the This foremost writers on cookery. selection has been made with great care and is believed to be one of the most complete and satisfactory in existence.
RHODE ISLAND JOHNNY CAKE Any kind of corn meal can be substituted in the following recipe, but the flavor of the true Rhode Island Johnny Cake cannot be realized without meal made from well seasoned MRS. CURTIS'S COOKBOOK It white (not yellow) corn ground nearly as fine as flour. This is known to the trade as bolted white Indian meal. It is packed in small cloth bags by certain manufacturers and can be obtained from grocers in most parts of the United States if specially requested. The process of making Johnny Cakes is most simple.
Measure in a mixing bowl a quantity of meal sufficient for the needs of the family, which can be determined only by experience, and add boiling water in a thin stream, stirring vigorously until the dough is nearly, but not quite, soft enough to pour. should be very wet but firm. Stir in salt to taste and fry with butter, or any suitable fat, on a hot griddle until a crisp brown crust is formed on both sides. The cakes are usually formed of a single mixing spoonful of dough and flattened so as to be about three or four inches across and an inch or less in thickness. They are best relished by most persons when the crust is firm and brittle and the interior soft and moist. A little experience will enable any one to make Johnny Cake dough of the right consistency. Some cooks prefer to use no more hot water than is necessary to thoroughly scald the meal and then thin the dough to the desired consistency with fresh or skimmed milk. Made by either recipe Rhode Island Johnny Cakes are most wholesome and delicious.
Southern Johnny Cake.
Stir together 3 cupfuls of Indian meal, 1 of flour, 1 of molasses and a little salt, with enough sour or buttermilk to make a stiff batter. Stir in 1 teaspoonful of soda and bake in a hot oven. (Wm. H. Lee.) Mrs. Jake's Hoe Cakes.
Take 1 pint of white corn meal, teaspoonful salt, and 1 teaspoonful of sugar. Mix well and add sufficient boiling milk or water to scald. (Add 2 eggs, or not, as desired.) The batter should be thick enough not to spread when put on the griddle.
Grease the griddle with baconfat or lard, and drop the batter upon it from spoon. Flatten the cakes until about inch in thickness. Cook slowly but do not burn. When of a brown color on underside turn over and brown other side. Spread a little butter on each cake. Serve immediately when done. (Wm. H. Lee.) Southern Corn Pone.
Sift a quart of white corn meal, add a teaspoonful of salt. Pour on enough cold water to make a mixture which will squeeze easily through the fingers. Work it to a soft dough.
Four related cornmeal breads, all built on the same principle: scalded meal, a hot greased griddle or a hot oven. The Rhode Island version is the most exacting of them and the least forgiving of the wrong meal.
- The hinge: scald the mealWater must be at a full rolling boil when it hits the meal, added in a thin stream with constant stirring. Hot-but-not-boiling water leaves the starch unswollen and the cakes turn gritty and fall apart on the griddle.
- Indian mealIndian meal is simply cornmeal. "Bolted white Indian meal" is white corn ground fine and sifted; the nearest current equivalent is fine white stone-ground cornmeal, and Rhode Island whitecap flint meal is still milled and sold for this purpose. Standard yellow supermarket meal gives a coarser cake of different character -- the recipe allows any meal, but says the true Rhode Island flavour depends on the fine white sort.
- ConsistencyAim for a batter that mounds on the spoon and holds its shape rather than pouring "nearly, but not quite, soft enough to pour." If it spreads thin on the griddle, stir in more dry meal a spoonful at a time and let it stand two or three minutes to absorb.
- Griddle heat and timingThe recipe wants a hot griddle with a generous film of fat, but for cakes an inch thick a moderate setting serves better: the crust needs time to set hard while the interior stays wet, so allow several minutes a side. High heat browns the outside before the centre cooks.
- "A hot oven"For the Southern Johnny Cake, read roughly 425F to 450F, in a preheated greased pan. The batter is stiff, so it will not level itself; spread it before baking. No pan size or time is given, and both will depend on the depth to which this quantity of batter is spread.
- Soda and sour milkThe teaspoonful of soda in the Southern Johnny Cake depends on the acid in sour milk or buttermilk to work. Cultured buttermilk substitutes directly. Sweet milk soured with vinegar also works, but plain milk will leave a soapy taste and no lift.
- Salt and sugar quantitiesSalt and thickness -- Two measurements in the hoe cake are incomplete as printed -- the salt quantity and the thickness to which the cakes are flattened -- and cannot be reconstructed with confidence. The sugar is given as a teaspoonful. For a pint of meal, half a teaspoon of salt is conventional; for the thickness, the Rhode Island cakes elsewhere on the page are flattened to an inch or less.
- YieldThe Rhode Island recipe deliberately gives no quantity, leaving it to experience; the hoe cake's pint of meal will make a dozen or so cakes three or four inches across, but no firm yield can be drawn from the text.
- Eat them hotThese toughen as they cool. Cook in batches and serve straight from the griddle rather than holding them in a warm oven.
Johnnycake, hoecake and corn pone are the same idea worked out in different kitchens: cornmeal moistened with liquid inhot or cold, scalded in some versions and not in others and cooked on a hot surface, a technique inherited from Native American cooking and adopted by colonial households. The name's origin is disputed; it is variously traced to "journey cake" and to "Shawnee cake," with no settled evidence for either. Hoecake is traditionally said to take its name from being baked on the blade of a field hoe, though it was also cooked on a griddle or a board set before the fire. What the Rhode Island entry shows is how seriously regional identity attached to a near-two-ingredient bread by the turn of the twentieth century: the insistence on finely bolted white meal, against the yellow used elsewhere, is a boundary line drawn in a mixing bowl. Rhode Island's attachment to the spelling of the word has reached its legislature, and white flint corn is still grown and milled there.