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Poem Pone
I TEASPOON SALT I CUP MILK 3 TABLESPOONS MELTED BUTTER 2 EGGS, SLIGHTLY BEATEN Mix dry ingredients well together; then mix liquid ingredients. Combine the 2 mixtures and beat well. Spread batter in buttered pan and bake in hot oven. This is the original recipe of Bishop Williams, the rhyming New York bishop-epicure, who apotheosized it in a long poem called "Lake George Pone," in which he stops to tell us that he would love to have some sour cream to put into his pone. But he wails, "For sure and indeed, in all towns I remember Sour cream is as scarce as June bugs in December."
So he compromises on milk, since there is no cream at Lake George and adds cream of tartar and soda, which we merely modernize to baking powder. And it must have come out to episcopal perfection for he finishes thus: "To eat at the best this remarkable cake, You should fish all day long on the royal-named lake, With the bright water glancing in glorious light, And beauties unnumbered bewildering your sight, On mountain and lake, in water and sky; And then, when the shadows fall down from on high, Seek Sabbath Day Point as light fades away, And end with this feast the angler's long day, Then, then you will find without any question That an appetite honest waits on digestion."
A cornbread batter of the pour-and-bake sort, given here in the loose style of mid-century outdoor cookery books that assumed the cook knew what a pone was. A few of the instructions need numbers attached.
- "Hot oven"Read this as 425-450F. Cornbread wants heat from the start so the outside sets and browns before the crumb dries out; a moderate oven gives a pale, cakey result.
- Preheat the panThe recipe says only to spread the batter in a buttered pan, but if you want a crisp bottom crust you can butter a cast-iron skillet or heavy pan, heat it in the oven, and pour the batter into it hot.
- Baking powder for cream of tartar and sodaThe note about modernizing is reasonable: early baking powders were cream of tartar plus bicarbonate with a starch buffer, though most modern powders are double-acting and use other acid salts. Roughly 2 teaspoons of baking powder stands in for the older pairing of 1/2 teaspoon soda and 1 teaspoon cream of tartar.
- If you do use sour creamSour cream or buttermilk in place of the milk wants soda rather than baking powder, since the acid in the dairy does the work the cream of tartar was doing. Soda without enough acid to neutralize it is what gives the soapy taste.
- Cornmeal grindPone was generally made with a coarser stone-ground meal than most supermarket cornmeal. A medium or coarse grind gives a grittier texture; fine degerminated meal behaves more like flour.
- Doneness and yieldA 9-inch round or 8-inch square pan takes about 20-25 minutes at 425F, until the top is well browned and a skewer comes out clean. Figure six to eight servings, and eat it hot -- cornmeal breads stale quickly.
Pone comes from a Virginia Algonquian word, recorded as apan or appones, meaning something baked; English colonists took it up for cornmeal bread cooked on a hearth or in a covered pan, and the word stayed in American use long after the technique changed. Lake George -- the "royal-named lake," named for George II -- was a fashionable fishing resort in the southeastern Adirondacks. Baking powder was sold commercially from the mid-1800s and gradually displaced the older cream of tartar and soda method.