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Johnny Cake
1 breakfast-cup of Maize meal 1 1/2 breakfast-cups of flour 1 teacup of sugar 1 1/2 ounces of butter 1/2 teacup of milk Baking powder Rub the butter into the flour, add the sugar and baking-powder; add milk to the dry ingredients, forming a very thick batter. Bake in a well-greased, shallow baking-tin, in a moderately hot oven for about three-quarters of an hour. Cut open and butter while hot; or it may be eaten cold. A teacup of sultanas may be added if liked.
A plain sweet cornmeal loaf, baked in a tin rather than on a griddle. The measurements are British household cups, and the liquid quantity is the thing to watch.
- Breakfast-cup and teacupA breakfast-cup is roughly 10 fl oz, about 1 1/4 US cups; a teacup is about 6 fl oz, or 3/4 cup. So this is roughly 1 1/4 cups cornmeal, just under 2 cups flour, 3/4 cup sugar and 3/4 cup sultanas.
- Maize mealPlain cornmeal, medium or fine grind. Not cornflour/cornstarch, and not the degerminated instant polenta sold for quick cooking.
- Butter by weight1 1/2 ounces is 3 tablespoons. It is rubbed in cold, as for a scone, rather than creamed.
- Unstated baking powderThe original simply says "baking powder" with no amount. A common rule of thumb is roughly a teaspoon per cup of flour, which would suggest two to three teaspoons here depending on whether the maize meal is counted; the recipe is genuinely ambiguous and any figure is an inference, not a conversion.
- The milk is the problemHalf a teacup, about 3 fl oz, looks far too little to wet three cups of dry ingredients into any kind of batter, even a very thick one; the teacup intended may have been larger, or a quantity may have been lost in printing. Expect to add milk until it comes together as a stiff, spoonable batter.
- Oven"Moderately hot" is usually given as about 375-400F. In a shallow tin the loaf may well be done before three-quarters of an hour -- start testing at 25 to 30 minutes, when a skewer comes out clean and the edges pull from the tin.
- No eggsThis is a wholly eggless batter. The crumb will be closer to a scone or a soda bread than to a modern cornbread.
- YieldThe tin size is not given; something like an 8-inch square or a small loaf tin, cutting into eight to ten pieces.
Johnny cake is a North American cornmeal bread whose name is usually traced, though without firm documentation, to "journey cake" or to "Shawnee cake"; in its oldest forms it was a stiff meal-and-water paste baked on a board or griddle. This version has drifted a long way from that -- sweetened, half wheat flour, raised with baking powder, baked in a tin and offered with sultanas, closer in spirit to a tea loaf than to a hearth cake. Cornmeal was cheap and the batter needs no eggs.