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Ash Cake
1 quart corn meal 2 teaspoons salt 1 tablespoon shortening Boiling water Scald the meal; add the salt and shortening, and when the mixture is cool, form it into oblong cakes, adding more water if necessary. Wrap the cakes in cabbage leaves, or place one cabbage leaf under the cakes and one over them, and cover them with hot ashes.
An old hearth bread that predates the cookstove, set down here with almost no guidance on time or fire. The instructions below fill the gaps.
- The hinge: scald properlyPour water that is at a full rolling boil over the meal and stir at once until every bit is wetted; the starch has to gelatinize or the cakes crumble apart when handled. Use roughly equal volumes of boiling water and meal to start, then adjust once the mush cools.
- A quart of corn mealAbout 4 cups, or roughly 1 lb 4 oz. It makes a large batch: figure eight to ten oblong cakes about the size of a hand, enough for six to eight people.
- Corn meal then and nowCakes of this kind were commonly made with soft, fine, water-ground meal, though the recipe itself specifies only 'corn meal'. Modern degerminated meal absorbs less water and tastes flatter; stone-ground whole meal gives a texture much closer to the original.
- ShorteningA tablespoon of lard, bacon fat or butter all work. In this period the word covered any of these as well as the newer vegetable shortenings; vegetable shortening is the most neutral choice.
- Cook the mixture cool, not warmLet the scalded mush cool until you can handle it comfortably. Shaped hot, the cakes slump; shaped cold and stiff, they crack. Wet your hands to smooth the surfaces.
- If you use ashesOnly clean hardwood ash from an untreated wood fire. Never ash from charcoal briquettes, painted or pressure-treated lumber, or coal. Rake the coals aside, bury the leaf-wrapped cakes in the hot ash bed, and give them 30 to 45 minutes; they are done when a skewer comes out clean. Brush and rinse off every trace of ash before eating.
- Oven equivalentOn a preheated baking stone or heavy sheet at 425F the same cakes bake in about 30 minutes. Cabbage leaves still help: they steam the interior and keep the crust from setting too fast.
- ServingSplit hot and eat with butter, molasses, or the liquor from a pot of greens or beans. They stiffen badly once cold and are best griddled in fat the next day.
Ash cake is the plainest form of American corn bread, made where there was no oven at all: a stiff meal dough cooked directly in the ash of a hearth or campfire, a technique inherited from Native cooking in the Southeast and carried on in slave quarters, farm kitchens and army camps well into the nineteenth century. It travelled under many names and, when patted out on a hoe blade or board and set before the fire, is often said to be the ancestor of the hoe cake and the journey cake, though that derivation is traditional rather than documented. Corn was, in the years when wheat was being shipped to Europe, the grain the government urged householders to eat, and cookbooks of that period reached back for old corn recipes that needed no yeast, no eggs and no oven fuel. The cabbage leaf here does the work of a pan, a job commonly done with corn husks or oak leaves as well.