Corn Dodgers
The ordinary dinner bread of the South.
Take the required quantity of corn meal, say a quart, and stir it up with cold water enough to make it like thick mush, just so that it can be shaped. Make it with hand or spoon, in shapes like goose eggs, and place them almost touching in a baking pan that is kept hot on top of the range while they are being placed. Bake in a hot oven.
It is usually insisted upon that no salt shall be put into this kind. Serve hot.
Simple as this is, some persons can make it twice as palatable as others. One requirement is to make the meal take up all the water it will carry without losing shape. Another is to bake it in a very hot oven, so that it will become brown without being too dry and hard.
While everybody will agree that there must be a perfection point for every common article, beyond which it cannot be improved, it is hardly likely that anyone will take the trouble to scald the meal for batter cakes. There is not time for all these little things in hotel business, and yet it has to be set down that therein lies the point that beats common work. The following will do without:
Two ingredients and no leavening mean everything depends on hydration, pan heat and oven heat. Get those three right and the dodgers come out crisp-shelled and steamy inside; get them wrong and they are dry pellets.
- The hinge: a screaming hot, greased panThe hinge: a screaming hot pan -- The pan is heated on the range while the dodgers are shaped so the bottoms set the instant they touch metal; the recipe says to keep it hot on top of the range, not in the oven, and says nothing about greasing it. Cast iron holds that heat best. The shapes go almost touching, which will limit how much the sides dry out.
- "A hot oven" and "a very hot oven"No temperature is given in the book. By the usual modern equivalents for a hot oven, somewhere around 450F, and hotter still for the second instance, is a reasonable starting point. Expect roughly 25 to 30 minutes for goose-egg shapes; they are done when the crust is deep brown and the dodger sounds hollow and light.
- A quart of mealRoughly 4 cups, about 1 lb 4 oz. It will absorb somewhere near 2 to 2½ cups of water, but add it gradually — the target is stated in the text, the stiffest paste that will still hold a shape without slumping.
- Which cornmealThe Southern dinner bread of this period meant white, stone-ground, whole-grain meal. Modern degerminated supermarket meal is drier and blander and will need slightly more water. Do not use self-rising cornmeal mix, which carries baking powder and salt, or masa harina, which is nixtamalized and behaves differently.
- The salt questionThe author reports the convention that no salt goes in, and it reads as a regional preference of the era rather than an error. Cooks who want salt commonly use around a teaspoon per quart of meal. Leaving it out is defensible if the dodgers are eaten with pot likker, gravy or salt pork.
- Cold water versus scaldingCold water is what the recipe specifies; no reason is given. Scalding the meal — pouring boiling water over it and letting it stand ten minutes — gelatinizes the starch and gives a smoother interior and better shape retention. Note that the author's aside about nobody taking the trouble to scald the meal is made about batter cakes, not about dodgers, though the same point about hotel kitchens having no time for small refinements applies.
- YieldA quart of meal makes about 16 to 18 dodgers the size described, enough for six to eight at table. They are served hot and do not keep; reheating in a hot oven is the only rescue.
- The unfinished last line"The following will do without:" appears to introduce whatever is printed after this entry rather than to belong to the dodger method; on that reading the instructions themselves are complete.
Corn dodgers belong to the plainest branch of American corn cookery — meal, water, heat, and nothing else — the same family as ashcake, hoecake and johnnycake, and closely related to indigenous cornmeal breads that colonists in the South took up. The name is usually traced to the stiff, dodging shape of the dough, or in some tellings to the hardness of the finished bread; both explanations are traditional rather than documented. Wheat flour was expensive and often imported in the antebellum and postbellum South, while corn grew everywhere and could be ground at a local mill, so cornbread in one form or another was the everyday bread, not a side dish. Its appearance in a manual of hotel stewarding is telling: the author is writing for hotel kitchens that had to put a recognizably Southern dinner bread on the table quickly, and much of the entry is really about the gap between what a careful home cook can do and what a hotel line has time for.