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Johnny Cake
Scald 1 pint of milk in a double boiler. Sift in 2/3 of a cupful of corn-meal which has been mixed with 1½ teaspoonfuls of salt. Stir until just thick enough to be creamy, not at all thick or stiff, then take off quickly. Drop in the beaten yolks of 4 eggs, beating hard. Add the stiffly beaten whites, turn instantly into a shallow well-greased pan and bake about half an hour in a hot oven.
This is the soft, spoonable style of johnny cake — closer to a cornmeal spoonbread than to the flat griddle cake of the same name. The eggs do all the lifting, so the batter must go into the oven the moment the whites are folded in.
- Oven temperatureA "hot oven" in books of this period means 400–425F. Thirty minutes at 400F suits a shallow pan; the top should be browned and the centre just set.
- Salt quantity is unclearThe printed salt measure is not legible as a usable figure. For a pint of milk and two-thirds cup of meal, a scant teaspoon is the sensible range, and the amount should be judged by taste rather than read off the page.
- Corn-mealUse plain stone-ground yellow or white cornmeal, not self-rising cornmeal mix and not corn flour or masa. Fine or medium grind absorbs the scalded milk smoothly; coarse grind will stay gritty in the short cooking time given.
- Consistency at the stoveThe instruction to stop while the mush is only "creamy" is the hinge of the recipe. Cook it to a stiff porridge and the beaten whites cannot be folded through, and the finished cake turns dense and pasty.
- Cooling before the yolksLet the mush stand off the heat for a minute or two before the yolks go in, and beat hard as directed. Yolks dropped into near-boiling mush will set into threads.
- Fold, do not stirThe whites should be cut and folded in with a spatula until barely combined. The recipe's "turn instantly into a shallow pan" is there because the foam begins collapsing at once.
- PanAn 8- or 9-inch square pan or a similar shallow dish, well greased. A deeper pan gives a wet centre at this temperature.
- Yield and servingServes four to six as a hot bread. It is best spooned out at the table while it is still puffed, with butter; it falls as it cools and reheats poorly.
"Johnny cake" (also jonakin, journey cake) covers a wide family of American cornmeal breads going back to colonial adaptations of Native cornmeal cookery, and the name has been attached to everything from a bare meal-and-water cake baked on a board before the fire to the rich egg-raised version here. Rhode Island and much of New England kept the thin griddle form; the softer, egg-lifted bakes shade into what the South calls spoonbread. Cornmeal was among the cheapest starches available, and a pint of milk with four eggs turns a small quantity of meal into a substantial dish. The recipe uses no chemical leavening; the beaten whites do the lifting.