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Virginia Ash Cake
Add a teaspoonful of salt to a quart of sifted corn meal. Make up with water and knead well. Make into round, flat cakes. Sweep a clean place on the hottest part of the hearth. Put the cake on it and cover it with hot wood ashes.
Wash and wipe it dry, before eating it. Sometimes a cabbage leaf is placed under it, and one over it, before baking, in which case it need not be washed.--Mrs. S. T.
Three ingredients and a fireplace. The whole thing hinges on the dough being stiff enough to hold a shape under a mound of ashes, and on the ashes being clean wood ash and nothing else.
- The quart of mealA quart of sifted cornmeal is about 4 cups, roughly 18 oz. With a teaspoon of salt and water it will make several flat cakes the size of a saucer.
- Water is unmeasured on purposeAdd it gradually until the dough is stiff enough to pat into a cake that holds its edge, not a pourable batter; too wet and it slumps into the ashes.
- Use the right mealCoarse stone-ground meal, probably white in a Virginia kitchen of this date, suits the recipe better than modern degerminated supermarket meal, which is drier and will not hold together as willingly. There is no leavening and no egg, so texture depends entirely on the meal and the kneading.
- Only hardwood ashIf you bake this in a real fireplace, the ashes must come from untreated hardwood alone. Ash from charcoal briquettes, painted or pressure-treated lumber, or artificial logs carries binders and metal salts you do not want on food.
- The cabbage leafThe leaf version is the easier one: it keeps grit off the crust so no washing is needed, and it steams the cake slightly. The leaf will char to paper on the outside and should be peeled away before serving.
- Washing the cakeWithout a leaf, the baked cake is rinsed under water and wiped dry at once. Do it quickly and dry it thoroughly, or the crust turns soft and the surface tastes faintly of lye, since wood ash is alkaline.
- An oven equivalentThe recipe knows no oven, but a preheated stone or heavy skillet in a hot oven will approximate it; judge by colour and a hollow sound when tapped rather than by a set time. You lose the ash flavor but keep the dense, close crumb the recipe is after.
- ServingSplit hot and eaten with butter, or alongside greens and pot liquor. It stales within hours; this is bread for the meal at hand.
Ash cake is the plainest form of the corn breads that ran through Southern cooking before stoves were common: meal, salt, water, and the hearth itself as the oven. It belongs to the same family as hoecake and johnnycake, and versions of it were made in slave quarters, on farms and in camps wherever there was a fire and no bakeware. Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1877, gathered recipes from named Virginia contributors -- here initialed as Mrs. S. T. -- and the instructions bother to explain how to sweep a clean place on the hearth. The cabbage-leaf variant, traditionally said to be the older and better method, shows up in accounts across the corn-growing South, sometimes with collard leaves standing in.