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Carolina Corn-Meal Rolls
Mix 1 pint of finely ground white corn-meal and 1 scant tablespoonful of salt. Drop in ½ of a tablespoonful of butter and pour over sufficient boiling water to make a very stiff dough. As soon as it can be handled, work it well with the hands, make up into oblong rolls and lay in a pan thickly sprinkled with dry corn-meal. Bake from half to three-quarters of an hour in a hot oven. When well made they will split open on top during the baking.
A scalded-meal dough of the plainest sort: four ingredients, no leavening, and all of its character coming from water temperature and oven heat. A few points make the difference between a hard lump and a roll that cracks open on top.
- The hinge: the water must be at a rolling boilNothing here rises. The only structure comes from scalding, which gelatinizes the cornmeal starch so it holds together and steams from the inside. Water merely hot, or boiled a minute earlier and gone off the boil, gives a crumbly dough that will not hold a shape.
- A pint of mealA pint is 2 cups, roughly 10 oz of finely ground white cornmeal. Water quantity is unstated because meals vary in absorbency; add the boiling water gradually until the mass is very stiff and barely wet.
- The saltA scant tablespoon in 2 cups of meal is heavy by current taste. Between 1 and 1 1/2 teaspoons suits most palates.
- White cornmeal, finely groundSouthern white meal is the intended article and is still sold, often stone-ground. Coarse yellow polenta-grade meal scalds into a much grittier, less cohesive dough here. If your meal is degerminated and very dry, it will drink more water.
- "A hot oven"425-450F. The high heat is what drives the steam that splits the crust; a moderate oven gives pale, dense rolls that never crack. Half an hour is enough for small rolls, three-quarters for large ones.
- Handling the doughWork it with a spoon first, then with wet or greased hands once it is cool enough to touch. Cooling too far makes it stiffen and crack when shaped, so move promptly.
- The meal-dusted panThe dry meal sprinkled under the rolls is doing what cornmeal does under a pizza: preventing sticking and building a gritty, toasted bottom crust. A heavy metal pan, preheated if you like, gives the best result.
- Yield and servingAbout eight oblong rolls. Best split hot with butter; they stale within hours and are worth reheating rather than keeping.
Scalded cornmeal breads run straight through Southern cookery, from ash cake and hoecake to corn pone, all of them built on the same principle: boiling water poured over meal makes a dough where no wheat gluten exists to make one. White meal, rather than the yellow favored in the North, was the Southern standard, and finely ground white meal from a local mill is what a recipe like this assumes. The absence of eggs, milk, and any leavening is the point in a book of low-cost recipes. The split top the recipe promises is simply steam finding its way out of a stiff dough in a hot oven.