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Corn Batter Cakes Without Flour
1 1/2 pounds of corn meal. 1 quart of water or milk. 4 ounces of lard. 4 eggs. Salt. 1 teaspoonful of baking powder.
Scald the meal with half the water, and mix up the same as if for corn bread. In all the preceding receipts where baking powder is directed to be used, it is to be understood that buttermilk and soda will do as well, if the buttermilk be genuine, not watered, and sour enough to counteract a small teaspoonful of soda to the pint.
A gluten-free griddle cake by accident rather than design: cornmeal, fat, eggs and liquid, with scalding doing the work that flour usually does. The proportions are given by weight, which makes them easy to scale.
- The scald is the whole recipePouring boiling liquid over the meal (the recipe uses half the water or milk for this) gelatinizes the starch and gives the batter enough body to hold together on the griddle without wheat flour. Use the liquid at a full boil, stir it into the meal at once, and let the mush cool to lukewarm before the eggs go in or they will scramble.
- Weights to volume1 1/2 pounds of cornmeal is roughly 4 1/2 to 5 cups; 4 ounces of lard is 1/2 cup. A quart is 4 cups, and only half of it is used for the scald.
- The meal itselfNineteenth-century "corn meal" was typically stone-ground and coarser than most supermarket cornmeal, and can behave differently in how it takes up liquid. Fine degerminated meal may give a slacker batter, so hold back some of the second half of the liquid and add it only until the batter drops thickly from the spoon.
- Baking powder of the periodMany powders of this era were single-acting, releasing much of their gas on contact with liquid, so the batter was best cooked promptly. One teaspoon for this much meal is modest leavening by modern standards; the eggs are likely doing much of the lifting.
- The buttermilk substitutionThe note at the end assumes cultured, genuinely sour buttermilk. Commercial buttermilk today is milder, and low-fat versions are milder still; a small teaspoon of soda per pint is at the upper limit and will taste soapy if the milk is not sharp.
- Fat and griddleLard gives the crispest edge, but butter or a neutral oil works. Cook on a medium griddle, around 375F, and expect these to want a minute or two longer per side than wheat pancakes because the batter is dense.
- Batter thickens on standingGelatinized cornmeal keeps absorbing liquid. If the batter stiffens between batches, slacken it with a little milk rather than letting the cakes cook up leaden.
- YieldAbout two dozen cakes of ordinary size, or breakfast for six to eight. The recipe halves cleanly.
Corn batter cakes belong to the long American habit of stretching or replacing wheat with maize, a habit that predates the republic and outlasted cheap flour by generations in the South and the Midwest. What is unusual here is the flat refusal of wheat altogether: this recipe leans instead on the scald and on four eggs. Quantities are given in pounds and quarts, the reader evidently working to a griddle's worth at a time. The closing note about buttermilk and soda is a period commonplace: chemical baking powders were still relatively new and not universally trusted, and cooks who had grown up souring milk saw no reason to buy in a tin what a crock could supply, provided the buttermilk was, as the author insists, genuine and not watered.