Johnny Cake
INGREDIENTS for small cake.-A teacupful of yellow Indian meal, a teacupful of flour, a teacupful of water, a teacupful of milk, a large tablespoonful of moist sugar, a dessertspoonful of baking powder, 2 eggs, a little salt, and any flavouring that may be liked, such as a few drops of vanilla or lemon essence.
AVERAGE COST, 5d.
The milk, water and eggs, with the flavouring, should be put in one bowl, and the flour, meal, sugar, baking powder and salt in another. Mix the contents each bowl separately, then put them together, and again mix well. Butter a tin and pour in the mixture, and put in a hot oven at once or the cake will not be light, Bake for about an hour.
TIME.- hour to bake the cake.
SEASONABLE at any time, particularly for a hot cake for breakfast.
JUMBLES.
Julienne, Soup à la.-INGREDIENTS for soup for 8 persons.-lb. of carrots, 1/2 lb. of turnips, 1/4 lb. of onions, 2 or 3 leeks, 1/24 head of celery, 1 lettuce, a little sorrel and chervil, if liked, 2 oz. of butter, 2 quarts of stock. AVERAGE COST, 2s.
Cut the vegetables into strips of about 14 inch long, and be particular they are all the same size, or to some will be hard whilst the others will be done to a pulp.
Cut the lettuce, sorrel, and chervil into larger pieces; fry the carrots in the butter, and pour the stock boiling to them.
When this is done, add all the other vege tables and herbs, and stew gently for at least an hour. Skim off all the fat, pour the soup over thin slices of bread, cut round about the size of a shilling, and serve.
TIME.-1 1/2 hour.
STRIPS OF VEGETABLE.
SEASONABLE all the year.
Note. In summer, green peas, asparagus-tops, French beans, &c., can be added. When the vegetables are very strong, instead of frying them in butter at first, they should be blanched, and afterwards simmered in the stock. The vegetables sold ready for Julienne in a condensed form by Chollet and Co., 134, Fenchurch Street, save a great deal of trouble, and are almost equal in flavour to fresh vegetables.
A thin cornmeal batter cake, closer to American corn bread than to anything in the English cake tradition. The printed page runs on into an unrelated entry for Soup à la Julienne; only the Johnny Cake instructions belong to this recipe.
- TeacupfulA Victorian teacupful is usually reckoned at about a quarter of a pint (5 fl oz, roughly 150 ml), though cup sizes varied. Because everything is measured in the same cup, the proportions hold even if your cup runs a little large or small.
- Yellow Indian mealIndian meal is cornmeal. Use a medium-grind yellow cornmeal, not cornflour/cornstarch and not masa harina.
- Moist sugarMoist sugar was unrefined soft sugar; light brown sugar is the closest modern equivalent. A large tablespoonful is about 20 g, so this is barely sweet by design.
- Dessertspoonful of baking powderA dessertspoon is two teaspoons. Two level teaspoons is ample for this quantity of batter.
- A hot ovenBeeton gives no temperatures; a 'hot oven' is conventionally read today as roughly 425-450F (220-230C). The instruction to get it in "at once" is the hinge: the baking powder starts working the moment wet meets dry, and a batter left standing bakes flat and dense.
- The hour is too longThe body text says about an hour, though the TIME line is damaged in the printing and may have read less. At that heat an hour will dry the cake out; batter of this consistency in an 8-inch square or 9-inch round tin is done in 25 to 35 minutes at 400-425F, when the centre springs back and a skewer comes out clean.
- Tin and yieldNo tin size is given. An 8-inch square or 9-inch round tin gives a cake about an inch deep, cutting into eight or nine pieces he note recrecipe's note recommends it as a hot cake for breakfast.
- FlavouringVanilla or lemon essence pushes this toward a tea cake. Leave it out if you want it to sit alongside savoury breakfast dishes; the corn flavour is better without.
Johnnycake is a New England and mid-Atlantic staple built on maize, a grain that grew well in colonial America, and its name is usually traced — traditionally rather than on firm documentary evidence — either to "journey cake" or to a corruption of "Jonakin." In its oldest form it was little more than cornmeal, water and salt cooked on a griddle or a board before the fire; the version here, with wheat flour, eggs, milk, sugar and chemical leavening, is the later nineteenth-century oven form, softened into something an English household would recognise as cake. Its appearance in Beeton suggests that American breakfast dishes were finding their way into British cookery books by the end of the century, and the label "Indian meal" is itself a period marker: to a Victorian reader maize was Indian corn, an imported grain that still needed identifying by origin.