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Johnnycake
2 TEASPOONS BAKING POWDER 4 TABLESPOONS SUGAR I CUP MILK I EGG, BEATEN LIGHT I TABLESPOON MELTED FAT Sift dry ingredients together. Mix liquid ingredients. Combine the 2 mixtures and beat well. Pour into well buttered baking pan and bake 20-25 minutes in hot oven. So this johnnycake is for softies but it's just as good to put you in a mood for close harmony on "Oh, Johnnie, Oh!" Real johnnycake is baked on a board or in a skillet, as described under Campfire Breads.
A quick-bread batter of the plainest sort, mixed in two bowls and baked hot and fast. The instructions assume a cook who knows what a johnnycake batter should look like, so a few numbers are worth pinning down.
- "Hot oven"In the vocabulary of mid-century American cookbooks this means 400-425F. At 20-25 minutes in a shallow pan that gives a browned top and a set centre; a slower oven produces a pale, gummy crumb.
- Pan sizeNo pan is specified. A batter built on one cup of milk suits an 8-inch square or a 9-inch round, giving a cake about an inch thick. Anything deeper needs closer to 30 minutes and a check with a skewer.
- "Melted fat"Unspecified; bacon drippings, lard or shortening would all fit a kitchen of this date, as would melted butter or a neutral oil. Let the fat cool slightly before it meets the beaten egg.
- BeatingThe recipe says "beat well." If the batter is largely cornmeal it needs little more than enough mixing to wet the dry ingredients; with a high proportion of wheat flour, prolonged beating can toughen the crumb.
- Baking powderTwo teaspoons; get the batter into the oven promptly, with the pan buttered and the oven already up to heat before mixing begins.
- YieldRoughly nine squares, or six generous wedges from a round pan. It is best eaten hot from the pan; reheat leftovers rather than serving them cold.
- The skillet versionThe closing note is not decoration. A johnnycake baked on a greased board before the coals, or in a heavy skillet, forms a hard crust and a denser interior. That is a different dish from this cake pan version, which the author openly calls the soft one.
Johnnycake belongs to the oldest layer of American cooking: a cornmeal batter or dough cooked on a hot surface, adopted from Native cornbreads by colonists along the eastern seaboard. The name's origin is disputed and every explanation offered for it (a corruption of "journey cake", of "Shawnee cake", of "jonakin") is traditional rather than documented. Rhode Island still argues over whether the true article contains anything but white cornmeal, salt and water. What appears here is the twentieth-century domesticated form, raised with baking powder, enriched with egg, milk and sugar, and baked in a pan rather than on a board propped at the fire. The author's mild scorn for it, and the pointer to the campfire method, is a fair summary of what happened to a great many hearth breads once ovens and chemical leaveners became universal.