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Northern Johnny Cake
2 cups corn-meal 2 cups sour milk 2 tablespoons fat 2 tablespoons sugar, white or brown 1 1/2 teaspoons salt 2 eggs 1 teaspoon soda 1 tablespoon cold water Cook together the meal, milk, fat, sugar and salt in a double boiler for about twenty minutes. Allow the mixture to cool, then add the well-beaten eggs and the soda dissolved in the water. Bake in a shallow iron or granite pan for about thirty minutes at 400 degrees F. In case there is not time to cook and cool the meal, the following method of mixing may be used. Mix and sift together the meal, sugar, salt and soda, add the sour milk gradually, then the well-beaten eggs and the melted fat. Bread made by this method does not have as good texture as that made by the first method.
A wet-batter corn bread with no wheat flour at all, leavened by soda reacting with sour milk. The scalded-meal method is the point of the recipe and worth the extra half hour.
- Sour milkNaturally soured milk; modern pasteurized milk does not sour the same way. Use buttermilk cup for cup, or stir 2 tablespoons lemon juice or white vinegar into 2 cups whole milk and let it stand 10 minutes.
- Why cook the meal firstTwenty minutes in a double boiler hydrates and gelatinizes the starch, so the finished bread is moist and tender rather than gritty. The book's own second method is offered as a compromise and it says plainly that the texture suffers.
- Cool before the eggs and sodaAdd them to a hot mush and the eggs will curdle and the soda will spend its gas before the pan reaches the oven. Cool to warm room temperature, no hotter than you can hold a finger in.
- Corn-mealPlain stone-ground yellow or white cornmeal, not self-rising cornmeal mix and not corn flour. Coarse meal benefits most from the cooked method.
- FatLard, bacon drippings or butter would all have been usual. Any of the three works; the second method specifies melted fat, while in the first the fat is simply cooked with the meal.
- SodaA full teaspoon is correct against 2 cups of soured milk. Dissolving it in the tablespoon of cold water is not fussiness, it distributes the soda evenly in a batter that has no flour to carry it.
- The pan"Shallow iron or granite" means a cast-iron skillet or an enamelled (graniteware) pan, roughly 9 or 10 inches, greased. The recipe does not specify preheating the pan.
- Oven and doneness400F as given. Thirty minutes should give a set centre and browned edges; test with a skewer, and expect a more custardy crumb than a modern wheat-and-cornmeal bread.
- YieldAbout eight to nine squares. Best hot from the pan with butter, since it stales quickly.