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Corn Meal Griddle Cakes
1 1/3 cups corn meal 1 1/2 cups boiling water 3/4 cup milk 1 tablespoon shortening 1 tablespoon molasses 2/3 cup flour 1 teaspoon salt 4 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder Scald corn meal with boiling water; add milk, melted shortening and molasses; add flour, salt and baking powder which have been sifted together; mix well; bake on hot greased griddle until brown.
A scalded-meal batter from a baking powder company pamphlet, which explains the generous leavening. The hinge is the scald: pouring boiling water over the meal gelatinizes the starch so the cakes are tender rather than gritty.
- Let the mush coolScald the meal, then let the mixture come down to lukewarm before adding the flour and baking powder; the cold milk called for next does much of that cooling. A hot batter sets the powder fizzing before it reaches the griddle, so less gas is left to lift the cakes.
- Corn meal typeUse plain yellow or white corn meal, not self-rising (which already carries leavening and salt) and not coarse polenta grind. Stone-ground meal drinks more water; expect a stiffer mush and thin it with extra milk.
- Baking powder quantityFour teaspoons for two cups of dry ingredients is heavy by current standards, and Royal was then a cream-of-tartar powder that released its gas on contact with liquid rather than in the pan. Two to three teaspoons will give good lift.
- ShorteningIn pamphlets of this date shortening generally meant lard or a vegetable shortening such as Crisco, though butter was used too. Melted butter or a neutral oil works; melt it before adding, as directed.
- "Bake" means griddlePeriod usage: to bake a griddle cake is simply to cook it on the griddle. The recipe says only 'hot greased griddle'; use medium heat and turn when the surface bubbles and the edges look dry.
- Batter consistencyCorn meal batters thicken as they sit. Check before each round and loosen with a spoonful of milk so the cakes spread rather than mounding.
- YieldAbout fourteen to sixteen cakes of four inches, serving four. Molasses browns quickly, so watch the first batch to gauge the heat.
The New Royal Cook Book was one of many free or near-free pamphlets issued by baking powder manufacturers from the later nineteenth century onward, and its recipes exist partly to demonstrate how much work chemical leavening could do. Corn meal griddle cakes themselves are older than the powder: hasty-pudding and scalded-meal batters go back to the earliest colonial adaptations of Native American maize cookery, originally raised with yeast, sour milk, or not raised at all. The tablespoon of molasses here is a survival of the New England habit of pairing corn with molasses, both cheap staples of the coastwise and West Indian trade, and it does double duty by helping the cakes color on the griddle.