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Hoe Cake
1 pint yellow cornmeal 1/4 cup sugar 1 pint milk 2 tablespoons butter 1/2 teaspoon salt Mix the dry ingredients together with the butter. Scald the milk and pour into the meal, stirring constantly. Cook directly over the fire until thickened. Drop by spoonfuls on a buttered pan, and bake in a hot oven until evenly browned.
A scalded-meal batter that is cooked to a mush on the stove before baking, which is what keeps these cakes tender rather than gritty. The measurements are given by volume in pints, so convert before you start.
- Pints to cupsA pint of cornmeal is 2 cups, and a pint of milk is likewise 2 cups. Cornmeal measured loosely by volume varies, so expect to adjust the milk slightly at the mush stage.
- Hot oven"Hot" in books of this period is usually taken as somewhere around 400-450F. The cakes are largely cooked through from the stovetop step, so the oven is mainly browning them; expect this to take only a short time, and go by colour rather than the clock.
- The hinge: cook the mush properly"Cook directly over the fire until thickened" means stirring the scalded milk and meal over direct heat until it is a stiff, pulling-away-from-the-pan porridge, not merely warm. Undercooked meal at this stage gives sandy cakes no amount of oven time will fix.
- ScaldingBring the milk just to the point where it steams and shivers at the edges, around 180F, then pour it over the meal in a steady stream while stirring. Boiled milk will not hurt the batter but is more likely to scorch on the pan bottom.
- Yellow cornmealUse a medium or fine stone-ground yellow meal, not corn flour and not the coarse grits sold for polenta. Self-rising cornmeal mix would be wrong here; there is no leavening in this formula and none is wanted.
- Shaping and panDrop the stiff batter in mounds and flatten them slightly with a buttered spoon, since they will not spread on their own. Butter the pan generously or the cakes will stick where the mush touches metal.
- Yield and servingTwo cups of meal should give somewhere in the region of a dozen cakes, depending on how large you drop them. They are best hot from the pan with butter, and like most plain cornmeal breads they stiffen and dry as they cool.
Hoe cake belongs to the family of plain cornmeal breads that carried much of the American South and the colonial North before wheat flour became cheap; the name is traditionally explained by the practice of baking the batter on the flat blade of a field hoe held over coals, though the term was already used loosely for any griddle- or hearth-baked corn cake by the nineteenth century. Corn breads of this kind are naturally free of meat and drippings and need no eggs, and cheap cornmeal breads were a common accompaniment to a vegetable or bean dinner. The stovetop scalding step here is the older, more careful method, closer to cornmeal mush than to a modern quick-bread batter, and it suits a period when coarse home-ground meal wanted softening before it would bake well.