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Cornmeal Drop Cakes
1 pint meal. 1/2 teaspoon salt. 1 cup hot water. 1 tablespoon crisco. 2 eggs beaten separately.
Stir in salt and crisco. When cool add yolks well beaten. If too thick add a little more milk or water. Add stiffly beaten whites last. Drop with spoon on greased hot griddle and cook on one side until brown, and puffed and full of air bubbles, then turn and cook on other side until cooked through.
A scalded-cornmeal batter lightened with beaten egg white, cooked like a thick pancake. The written method is compressed to the point of being elliptical, so read the sequence carefully before starting.
- The missing first stepThe instruction list assumes you pour the cup of hot water over the pint of meal — that is the whole point of the dish. Scalding gelatinizes the starch and softens the bran so the cakes are tender rather than gritty; "stir in salt and Crisco" happens into that hot mush, off the heat.
- A pint of mealA dry pint is 2 cups, roughly 10 oz of cornmeal. Fine or medium yellow or white meal both work; stone-ground meal drinks more liquid than degerminated supermarket meal, so expect to adjust.
- CriscoWilson's recipes name Crisco frequently, which is why the brand appears here rather than a generic fat. One tablespoon of any neutral solid shortening, or melted butter, does the same job.
- Cool before the yolks go in"When cool" is not decorative. Hot mush will scramble the yolks and slacken the beaten whites; let the mixture come down to warm at most.
- ConsistencyAim for a thick drop batter that mounds on the spoon but spreads a little on the griddle. Thin with milk or water a tablespoon at a time, before the whites are folded in, not after.
- Griddle heatMedium; the recipe specifies only a 'hot griddle.' Cornmeal browns fast and these cakes are thick, so a fierce griddle gives a dark crust over a raw middle.
- YieldThe recipe states none; it depends on how large you drop them. Serve hot with butter and syrup, or alongside a savory dish as a corn cake rather than a sweet pancake; there is no sugar in the batter.
Cornmeal batters scalded with boiling water run straight through American cookery from the earliest hoecakes and journey cakes onward — the technique predates chemical leavening entirely, and the beaten egg whites here do the work that baking powder does elsewhere. Mrs. Mary A. Wilson published her cookbook during and just after the First World War, when wheat conservation campaigns pushed corn, oat and rye breads hard in the American home kitchen, and a griddle cake made with no wheat flour at all was exactly the sort of thing food administrators wanted on the table. The named use of Crisco is of its moment: the hydrogenated shortening had come on the market in 1911 and was still being taught to cooks who had grown up with lard and butter.