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Parched Corn Meal Biscuits
1 cup yellow corn meal 2 cups peanut cream 2 teaspoons salt Put the meal into a shallow pan, and heat in the oven until it is a delicate brown, stirring frequently. Make the nut cream by mixing peanut butter with cold water and heating. It should be the consistency of thick cream. While the nut cream is hot, stir in the corn meal which should be hot. Beat thoroughly. The mixture should be of such consistency that it can be dropped from a spoon. Bake in small cakes on a greased pan.
If preferred, these biscuits may be made with cream or with butter in place of peanut cream, and chopped raisins may be added, one cup being the allowance for the quantities given above.
A leavenerless drop biscuit built on two hot components — toasted cornmeal and a thinned peanut butter "cream" — combined off the heat. The hinge is temperature: both parts must be hot when they meet, or the meal will not swell and bind and the cakes will crumble.
- Parching the mealSpread the cornmeal thin in a sheet pan and toast at 350F, stirring every few minutes, until it smells nutty and turns light tan — roughly 12 to 18 minutes. Take it to a delicate brown only; scorched meal turns the whole batch bitter.
- What peanut cream isSimply peanut butter let down with water to pouring-cream thickness, then heated. Whisk peanut butter gradually into cold water — roughly 1/2 to 2/3 cup peanut butter with enough water to make the 2 cups the recipe calls for — then bring it to a simmer. Add the water a little at a time and whisk hard; some stabilized modern peanut butters may seize or separate.
- The saltTwo teaspoons for one cup of meal is heavy by current taste, and some peanut butters of the period were sold unsalted. With commercial salted peanut butter, half a teaspoon to a teaspoon is closer to the mark.
- No leaveningThere is no baking powder, soda or egg here. These are dense, moist little cakes closer to a spoon-dropped pone than to a raised biscuit — do not expect lift, and do not compensate by adding a rising agent, since the batter has no gluten structure to hold gas.
- Baking temperature and timeThe original names none. A moderately hot oven, 400F, for 20 to 25 minutes suits them: drop tablespoon-sized mounds on a greased pan, spaced a little, and bake until the edges are set and browned.
- ConsistencyCornmeal keeps absorbing liquid as it stands, so judge thickness immediately after mixing and beat in a little more hot water if the batter stiffens past dropping consistency before it reaches the pan.
- YieldTablespoon-sized mounds from this quantity of batter will give considerably more than a dozen — expect two to three dozen small cakes. They are best warm; once cool they firm up considerably and are better reheated than eaten cold.
- The variationsSubstituting dairy cream or butter for the peanut cream gives a milder, richer cake but with less of the plant protein the nut cream supplied. The cup of chopped raisins turns it into something closer to a tea cake.
Meatless Cookery belongs to a run of American cookbooks published around the First World War, when meat conservation was both a patriotic campaign and a live vegetarian cause, and nut butters were the standard stand-in for animal protein. Peanut butter had been popularized in the 1890s and 1900s partly through the Battle Creek sanitarium kitchens and their health-reform imitators, and "nut cream" — peanut or almond butter emulsified with water — appears throughout books of this school as a substitute for dairy cream in soups, sauces and batters. Parching the meal is the older element: dry-toasting corn before grinding or cooking is a technique long predating these books, generally traced to Native American practice and carried into colonial and frontier kitchens, and it does two useful things here, deepening flavor and letting the hot meal thicken the hot cream on contact without any further cooking.