Home › Cavewoman Breads, Dumplin's and Mush › Sour Dough Corn Pone
Sour Dough Corn Pone
Stir into boiling water sufficient corn meal to make a thin batter. Cook 10 minutes, beating several times with a wooden spoon. Pour into a bowl and let stand until luke warm, then stir in sufficient salted dry corn meal to make it thick. Let rise in a warm room for 14-16 hours. Pat out into thick long cakes between floured hands and bake in moderate oven. "My clothes is all ragged as my language is rough, My bread is corn dodgers, both solid and tough; But yet I am happy and live at my ease, On sorghum molasses, bacon and cheese."
An old cowboy chorus.
This is a wild-fermented cornbread with no yeast, soda or baking powder in it at all: a cooked cornmeal mush is left to sour overnight and the souring alone lifts the cakes. The original gives no quantities, so the proportions below are working figures rather than the author's.
- The hinge: use whole-grain mealThe rise depends on wild yeasts and bacteria, which here come from the dry meal stirred in after cooking (and from the air), not from the boiled mush. Stone-ground whole-grain cornmeal, ideally fresh, is likely to ferment more readily than degermed, enriched supermarket meal, so it is the safer choice. A tablespoon of live sourdough starter stirred into the lukewarm mush is insurance if your meal is uncertain.
- Quantities for the mushAbout 1 cup cornmeal rained slowly into 4 cups boiling water gives the "thin batter" wanted. The 10 minutes of cooking with a wooden spoon is not fussiness -- cornmeal settles and scorches, and the beating both prevents that and gelatinises the starch so the mush holds water.
- Lukewarm, not hotWait until the mush is genuinely lukewarm, under about 100F, before adding the dry meal. Fermentation organisms are killed well below boiling, and stirring salted meal into hot mush gives you a stiff porridge that will never rise.
- How thick is thickAdd roughly 2 to 3 cups more cornmeal, with about 2 teaspoons salt worked through it, until the mass just holds a shape and pulls from the spoon. It should be pattable, not pourable.
- The long rise14 to 16 hours in a "warm room" means something like 75-80F. In a cool modern kitchen the dough will take longer and may not get far; a turned-off oven with the light on, or a proofing setting, is closer to the intent. Expect a sour smell, a few bubbles and modest swelling -- this never rises like wheat dough.
- Oven and panA moderate oven is usually reckoned at about 350-375F. Bake the cakes on a preheated, well-greased cast-iron griddle or heavy sheet until the crust is firm and deep brown; an inch-thick pone will want something in the region of 30 to 45 minutes. For a harder shell, start them in a hotter oven and drop the heat once the crust sets.
- ShapingFloured hands. The original asks for thick long cakes; in practice keep them to about 3 inches wide and an inch or so thick, as much thicker pones tend to stay gummy in the middle at this temperature.
- Yield and servingThe quantities above make six to eight pones. They are dense and dry by design, meant to be eaten hot with butter, bacon fat, sorghum or a bowl of beans, and they turn to stone once cold -- reheat on a dry skillet.
"Pone" comes into English from an Algonquian word recorded by early Virginia colonists as apan or appone, meaning something baked, and it stayed attached to plain cornmeal cakes for the next three centuries. Before chemical leavens were cheap and reliable, a cook who wanted lift in a corn bread had few options: eggs, a sourdough or salt-rising ferment, or nothing. This method -- cook a mush, sour it overnight, stiffen it with dry meal -- is the frontier and cattle-camp version, requiring only meal, water, salt and time, all of which travelled well. The "corn dodger" of the cowboy chorus is the same family of bread baked harder and smaller, and its reputation for being "solid and tough" was earned honestly.