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Johnny Cake (T melted butter egg C sour)
1 C yellow corn meal. 1/2 C flour (Club House). 1/2 C sugar. 1/4 t salt. 2 T melted butter 1 egg 1 C sour milk 1 t soda Mix together corn meal, flour, sugar and salt. Dissolve soda in sour milk and add to dry ingredients. Stir in beaten egg and melted butter, Bake in moderate oven about 25 minutes.
Mrs. J. E. Triggs. 2 C corn meal 2 C flour 14 C brown sugar 1 t salt
A community-cookbook johnny cake typeset in the compressed shorthand of the era, with the ingredient list stranded at the end and at least one measurement mangled in printing. Read the proportions before you start.
- The liquid is shortFour cups of dry meal and flour against one cup of sour milk will not make a batter that pours; it barely makes a dough. Either the milk quantity was misprinted or the recipe assumes you will add more by eye until it drops thickly from the spoon. Expect to need 1 1/2 to 2 cups of liquid total.
- "14 C brown sugar"Almost certainly 1/4 cup, the fraction bar lost in printing. A quarter cup across four cups of dry ingredients gives a faintly sweet, savoury-leaning johnny cake.
- Sour milkNot spoiled milk but naturally soured raw milk, acidic enough to react with the soda. Buttermilk is the direct replacement; failing that, a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar stirred into a cup of milk and left ten minutes.
- Soda and acidOne teaspoon of soda is the entire leavening and it needs that acid to work. Dissolve it in the sour milk as directed, mix quickly, and get the pan into the oven — the lift begins the moment the two meet.
- Moderate ovenConventionally taken as somewhere around 350-375F. At 25 minutes a shallow batter in a greased 9-inch square or a 10-inch cast-iron skillet should be set and lightly browned; test with a skewer at the centre.
- Corn mealCorn meal of this period was often stone-ground and coarser than most supermarket meal today. A medium or coarse grind gives the right sandy crumb; fine degerminated meal makes something closer to a plain cake.
- YieldRoughly 9 to 12 squares. Best eaten warm the day it is made, as no-fat-heavy cornbread stales fast.
Johnny cake, also written jonakin and journey cake, is one of the oldest continuously made American breads, generally traced to New England adaptations of Native cornmeal cookery, and its name has been explained a dozen ways without any of them being settled. By the time this congregation collected recipes, the original hearth-baked cornmeal-and-water cake had picked up wheat flour, an egg, butter and sugar, and moved into a pan in the oven — the trajectory of nearly every colonial quick bread once soda, cheap white flour and reliable ranges arrived. The reliance on sour milk marks the recipe as pre-refrigeration in spirit: a household with a milk cow or a daily delivery always had milk turning, and soda-plus-sour-milk was the standard way to use it before commercial baking powder fully displaced the practice.