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Johnnie Cake
Make the usual ash cake mixture, but this time thin it with only 1 cup of boiling water. Beat until light, then form cakes 1/2 inch thick on a clean hardwood board, or on a metal pancake sheet. Stand this before the fire in a slanting position until the cakes set, then place upright. Cook slowly. When one side is brown turn the cakes and slant the board again so they won't fall off. Then split into two steaming halos, and always be lavish with the butter. Johnnie cakes were originally known as "journey cakes," probably because they could be cooked anywhere along the route by covered wagon. And today they serve the trailer sojourner quite as well.
A perfect sandwich stuffing for Johnnie cake is pokeweed that can be found along the roads most anywhere. It must be picked young, when stems and top leaves are baby-pink, then boiled with strips of salt pork, and the whole toothsome filling stuffed into a real native snack that might be called a Covered-trailer Sandwich. And of course there's no law against laying some of the greens with the lean of the pork between halves of any of these other hot breads. But remember that the roots of pokeweed are poisonous, so use only the tender top parts.
Or you can cook the pork mixed right into the dough and have:
The bread itself is a plain cornmeal batter baked on a board before an open fire, but the filling this entry recommends is the problem, and it governs everything below.
- Pokeweed is the reason to stop herePhytolacca americana contains phytolaccatoxin and related saponins in every part of the plant, shoots and young leaves included, not only the roots as the text claims. The traditional handling required several changes of boiling water, all of them discarded; a single boil with salt pork, as directed here, leaves the toxins in the pot and in the pork fat.
- What poisoning looks likeReported effects run to prolonged vomiting, cramping and bloody diarrhoea, with children and anyone eating a large portion at greatest risk. Pink or reddish stems, which this entry treats as a sign of tenderness, are generally taken as a sign of higher toxin content.
- Roadside foragingThe text sends the reader to verges and roadsides, which adds vehicle runoff and herbicide to a plant that is already hazardous, and puts identification in the hands of someone driving past, at the early growth stage when the plant is least distinctive.
- The pork does not fix itCooking the greens with salt pork, or working the mixture into the dough as the final line proposes, keeps the cooking liquid and the compounds in it with the food rather than pouring them off. Heat alone does not destroy them; the traditional method relied on leaching, not on cooking.
- The bread, separatelyA plain cornmeal johnnycake is an ordinary and safe thing to bake, and any current recipe will serve. Use one rather than reconstructing the filling here.
- "The usual ash cake mixture"This entry is a variation and gives no ingredient list of its own; it refers the reader back to a base batter given elsewhere in the book, and the only quantities on this page are one cup of boiling water and a 1/2-inch thickness.