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Corn-Meal Dodgers
Mix together 1 quart of corn-meal and 1 teaspoonful of salt then rub in 1 1/2 tablespoonfuls of shortening, working it in thoroughly with the hands. Slowly add just sufficient boiling water to make a stiff paste which can be molded. Make into thick pats, place an inch apart on greased pans and bake in a quick oven until crisply browned.
A scalded-meal bread with four ingredients, where the whole result depends on the water being genuinely boiling. Nothing here needs modernising except the oven and the vague shortening measure.
- Quick ovenRead this as 425–450F. The dodgers want fast heat to set the outside into a crust before the interior dries out; a moderate oven gives you pale, crumbly pats.
- Boiling water is the hingeThe water must be at a rolling boil as it goes in. Scalding gelatinises the cornmeal starch, which is the only thing binding these — there is no egg, no leavening and no wheat flour. Hot-but-not-boiling water gives a paste that will not hold a shape.
- A quart of corn-mealRoughly 4 to 4 1/2 cups by dry measure, about 1 1/4 lb. Use plain stone-ground or standard yellow or white cornmeal, not self-rising cornmeal mix and not the coarse polenta grind.
- "1/2 tablespoonfuls of shortening"The original as printed is ambiguous — likely 1 1/2 tablespoons, with the leading digit lost. For a quart of meal, 1 1/2 to 2 tablespoons of lard, bacon drippings or vegetable shortening is the sensible range.
- Water quantityNone is given because it varies with the grind. Plan on something in the region of 2 1/2 to 3 cups, but treat that only as a starting guess; add it in stages and stop when the mass holds a pat without slumping or cracking.
- Shaping and spacingWet or greased hands keep the hot paste from sticking. Thick pats, about 3/4 inch and roughly palm-sized; the inch of space between them lets the sides brown rather than steam.
- Timing and yieldFigure 25 to 35 minutes, until the tops are firm and browned and the bottoms are crisp. A quart of meal makes about 12 to 16 dodgers.
- Eating themBest hot, split and buttered, or alongside greens, beans or a pot of soup to soak up the liquid. They stale within hours; reheat in a dry skillet rather than a microwave.
Dodgers belong to the family of unleavened cornmeal breads — hoecake, corn pone, ashcake, johnnycake — that carried Southern and frontier households through periods when wheat flour, eggs and chemical leavening were either unavailable or too expensive. The origin of the name is uncertain, but by the nineteenth century "corn dodger" was in wide use in the American South and lower Midwest for a hard-baked pat of scalded meal. The ingredients are cornmeal, salt, fat and water, and the technique substitutes boiling water for the binding and lift that a richer recipe would buy with eggs and butter. The same scalding trick underlies the batter for hush puppies and the crust of a skillet pone.