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Cracklin Bread
Take one quart sifted corn meal and a teacup of cracklins. Rub the latter in the meal as fine as you can. Add a teaspoonful of salt and make up with warm water into a still dough. Make into pones, and eat hot.--Mrs. P. W.
A four-ingredient bread that depends entirely on the quality of the cracklings and the heat of the pan. Nothing here leavens, so the pones stay dense and are meant to be eaten straight from the oven.
- CracklingsThese are the crisp browned bits of skin and connective tissue left after rendering lard, salty and still carrying some fat. Supermarket bagged pork rinds are puffed and dry and behave differently; cracklings sold at butcher shops or rendered at home from fatback or skin are closer to what was meant. A teacup is usually reckoned at somewhere between a half and three-quarters of a cup; take it as roughly three-quarters, chopped small.
- Quart of mealReckon a quart of sifted cornmeal as roughly 4 to 4 1/2 cups, somewhere over a pound by weight depending on grind. Stone-ground white cornmeal will give the texture closest to the original.
- "Still dough"Read as stiff dough, most likely a printer's slip. It should hold a shape when squeezed in the hand, not pour.
- Warm waterWarm rather than cold water helps the meal hydrate and cohere without egg, milk or leavening. Add it gradually; meals vary by a third of a cup or more in what they will take.
- SaltCracklings are usually salted already. Taste a piece before adding the full teaspoon.
- BakingNo oven or vessel is specified in the recipe; a hearth oven or a heavy skillet is the likely original. In a modern kitchen, a heavy skillet or baking sheet greased with lard and preheated in a hot oven (around 425-450F) works; allow roughly 25 to 35 minutes, until well browned.
- Shaping and yieldPones are usually palm-sized, flattened slightly, patted into shape by hand. A quart of meal should give roughly eight to ten, enough for a family alongside greens or beans.
- Eat hotThis is not politeness. With no fat in the dough beyond what the cracklings carry and no leavening at all, the pones firm up hard within an hour and are unpleasant cold.
Cracklings were a byproduct, not a purchase. At hog-killing time the fat was rendered down for lard, and what remained in the kettle was too good to throw out, so it went into cornbread, hominy and greens across the rural South. The word pone is generally traced to an Algonquian term for baked bread, picked up by English colonists in the Chesapeake and carried through Virginia cookery for three centuries. Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1879, gathered contributions from dozens of Virginia households, which is why so many entries carry only initials; the brevity of this one suggests a dish nobody in her audience needed explained.