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Corn Batter Cakes
1 pound of white corn meal. 1/2 pound of flour. 3 ounces of melted lard (1/2 cup). 2 eggs. A little salt. 1 quart of milk or water. 1 teaspoonful of baking powder.
Mix gradually to avoid having lumps in the batter, add the lard, melted, and the powder last. If no milk, a spoonful of syrup is required to give color. But sometimes you have to work for thorough philomaizians who love corn for itself alone and do not want any flour in theirs. In that case you must scald the meal.
A hotel-kitchen batter written by weight and scaled for a griddle that ran all morning. The quantities convert cleanly, and the only real technique is buried in the last sentence.
- Weights to cupsOne pound of white cornmeal is about 3 cups; half a pound of flour is about 1 3/4 cups. The quart of milk makes a thin, pourable batter rather than a thick one, which is correct for this style.
- YieldAs written this makes roughly 2 quarts of batter, or about 30 cakes of four inches. Halve or quarter it for a household.
- The scalded-meal versionFor the all-corn version, pour boiling water or scalded milk over the meal and let it stand until it swells and cools to lukewarm before adding eggs and leavening. Skipping this leaves the cakes gritty, since cornmeal alone has no gluten to hold the batter together and needs the starch gelatinized instead.
- LeaveningA single teaspoon of baking powder for a pound and a half of dry meal and flour is light by current standards, and period baking powders were generally single-acting. Expect flat, tender, crepe-like cakes rather than fluffy ones.
- LardThree ounces melted is the half cup stated. Butter or a neutral oil substitutes directly, though lard gives the crisper edge the recipe assumes.
- The syrupWater-mixed batter browns poorly because there is no milk sugar or protein to brown. The spoonful of syrup is there purely for color, not sweetness, and molasses or cane syrup does the job better than corn syrup.
- Griddle heatMedium-high, around 375F, lightly greased. The batter is loose enough to spread on its own; turn once when the surface has set and the bubbles stop closing over.
- Mixing"Mix gradually to avoid lumps" most likely means combining the liquid with the dry in stages; the recipe does not say which goes into which. Letting the finished batter stand fifteen minutes helps the meal hydrate.
"Batter cakes" was the ordinary nineteenth-century American term for what we now call griddle cakes or pancakes, and a cornmeal batter was an everyday breakfast form of them. The book's aside about "thorough philomaizians who love corn for itself alone" is a joke coinage from Greek philo- and maize, and it points at a real and long-running argument: whether wheat flour belongs in a corn cake at all. The flourless partisans were on solid technical ground, since scalding the meal is the traditional workaround that makes an all-corn batter cohere, the same principle behind spoonbread and mush. It is worth remembering that American hotel and restaurant kitchens of the period turned out breakfast griddle cakes by the gallon of batter, and needed formulas given in pounds.