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Corn Pone
1 pint cornmeal 1 1/4 cups boiling water 1 teaspoon sugar 1/2 teaspoon salt 2 tablespoons butter Dissolve the sugar and salt in the water; work the butter into the cornmeal, then add the boiling water; cover and stand ten minutes; shape into oblong cakes two and one-half inches long. Bake in a quick oven twenty to thirty minutes.
A plain scalded-meal pone with no leavening at all — the texture depends entirely on how the meal is hydrated. Two details in the original need translating before you start.
- The hinge: the water must be boilingPouring genuinely boiling water over the meal gelatinizes the starch, which is the main thing binding these cakes. Water that has gone off the boil tends to give a crumblier pone that breaks up on the pan.
- A pint of cornmealTwo cups by volume, roughly 9–10 oz. Older recipes were often written for a fine water-ground meal; modern degerminated meal can hydrate differently, so add the water in two stages and stop when the mass just holds a shape.
- "A quick oven"Usually reckoned at somewhere around 400–425°F. At that heat the outside sets into a crust quickly while the interior stays moist, which is the point of a pone.
- The ten-minute standNot optional and not a resting period for convenience — it is when the meal finishes swelling. Keep it covered so the surface does not dry out and go gritty.
- No leaveningThere is no baking powder, soda or egg here, so expect a dense, close cake about the size and shape of a small bread roll. Nothing has gone wrong if it does not rise.
- Shaping and the panWet your hands to keep the hot meal from sticking. The recipe gives a length of two and a half inches but says nothing about thickness or what to bake on; a preheated greased cast-iron pan or skillet will colour the bottoms better than a cold sheet pan.
- YieldAround ten to twelve pones of the size specified — enough for four to six people as a bread course. Best eaten hot, within an hour of baking, as unleavened cornmeal firms up fast.
Pone comes from an Algonquian word, generally traced to Virginia Algonquian apan or appones, meaning something baked, and it was among the earliest food words English colonists took from Native neighbors. The dish itself is the simplest possible bread: meal, water, salt, and whatever fat is at hand, baked on a hot surface without yeast or chemical leavening.