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Cornmeal Cakes
1 pint meal. 1 heaping tablespoon cooked rice. 2 eggs beaten separately. 1 pint milk. 1 tablespoon flour. 1/2 teaspoon salt. 1 teaspoon baking powder. Mix meal, flour, salt, baking powder and rice. Add milk and yolks well beaten, and last, the stiff whites. Cook in hot fat till brown.
A thin, egg-lightened cornmeal batter fried on a griddle rather than baked. The instructions assume a cook who already knows what a griddle cake looks like, so a few quantities need pinning down.
- Pint means volumeA pint of meal is 2 cups (roughly 10 oz of cornmeal), and a pint of milk is likewise 2 cups. That ratio gives a batter thin enough to pour rather than mound.
- The mealWilson's "meal" is plain cornmeal; neither the colour nor the grind is specified. Fine or medium grind works; stone-ground coarse meal will stay gritty in a batter this quick, since nothing is scalded or soaked.
- The rice is not fillerA heaping tablespoon of cooked rice, well broken up as you mix, keeps the interior moist and slightly tender against the sandiness of the corn. Use plain leftover white rice, cold, and mash it into the dry ingredients so it does not sit in lumps.
- Leavening is deliberately lightOne teaspoon of baking powder for 2 cups of meal is scant by modern habit because the stiff-beaten whites are doing most of the work. Fold them in with a light hand at the very end and cook the batter promptly; it will deflate if it stands.
- "Hot fat" means a greased griddle"Hot fat" -- The recipe does not say how much fat or what vessel. Most likely a heavy skillet or griddle filmed with bacon fat, lard or oil rather than a deep pan; about a quarter cup of batter per cake, turned once when the surface has set and the edges look dry.
- Heat controlA pan hot enough to color the outside in a minute will leave the center wet. Keep the heat just under the point where the fat smokes.
- YieldAbout sixteen cakes of three to four inches, serving four. They are meant for breakfast or supper with butter and syrup or molasses, and they do not hold well; cook them to order.
Mary A. Wilson published this book in Philadelphia around 1920, immediately after a period in which American home cooks had been urged by the wartime Food Administration to stretch or replace wheat flour with corn, oats, barley and potato. Cornmeal breads and griddle cakes appear in unusual density in cookbooks of those years, and this one keeps the habit: a single tablespoon of wheat flour in the whole batter, with eggs and a spoonful of leftover rice doing the structural work that flour would otherwise do. Fried cornmeal cakes long predate that moment, of course — batter cakes of meal, milk and egg cooked on a hot greased surface are among the oldest things in the American domestic repertoire, and the thrifty use of cooked rice in a batter is a habit generally traced to Southern and Low Country kitchens, where rice was plentiful and rarely thrown away.