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Hoe Cakes, or Corn Bannocks
2 pounds of white corn meal. Half pound of lard. 1 teaspoonful of salt. Put the lard in the middle of the meal with the salt, and pour in a little boiling water to melt it. Then add cold water or milk to make like thin mush. Bake on a griddle or "hoe," placing the dough with a spoon and flattening out thin. "Why cannot we have this?" "You can have it." "What is it folded so nicely in a napkin? Looks like brown bread." "It is brown bread." "And you have brown bread plenty on hand all the time?" "O, but this is not bakers' Boston brown; this is delicious." That was said before the Chicago fire. O, incomprehensible hotel boarders who live always on the fat of the land and tire of it! But in a well-regulated hotel you can have anything. This is one of the varieties of bread made principally of corn meal which the Boston writer before quoted, had in mind: "On account of its lack of gluten, Indian meal is not well adapted for making bread without a slight admixture of wheat or rye flour." That is the eastern idea, not the southern or western. This kind of bread is very It contains no shortening, except what may be conveyed by rich buttermilk, when that can be had instead of baking powder, and is probably very healthful eaten cold. Reckless inhabitants of the hotel world, generally prefer to eat it right away quick while it is hot. And still very few deaths occur.
Steamed, or "Home-Made" Brown Bread. 2 pounds of corn meal. 1 quart of boiling water. Half pint of re-boiled, black molasses (coffee cup full). 1 1/2 pints of cold milk. 1 teaspoonful of salt. 4 heaping teaspoonfuls of baking powder. 1 pound of graham flour. 1 pound of white flour.
Pour the water boiling into the meal and stir; then mix in the molasses and the other ingredients in the order as written--the powder in the flour--and stir up thoroughly. It makes a stiff batter, too soft to be handled. Put it in two pails with tight-fitting lids and steam from 4 to 6 hours, then bake a short time to form a crust. The pails should be made for the purpose, of best stovepipe iron, a trifle wider at top than at bottom. Brush a little lard over the insides and then wipe it off thoroughly before putting in the dough, and there will be no stains on the crust when done. Where there is a steam chest to the range, over which vegetables are steamed, the pails can be set inside in the water, and then there is nothing in the bread line more easily made than this. Makes 8 pounds of bread; cuts into about 4 dozen slices. Enough for the average orders of 75 people for one meal, there being other kinds of bread. But if you have had it talked about all through the house 40 people will get away with this much easily. Such is the effect of advertising. Should the bread cut sticky, use a little less liquid in mixing next time. Our "Twenty ways" will include four baked puddings of Indian meal, of different degrees, and this following will, probably, by good judges, be considered the best. "Tell that cook," said a healthy St. Louis captain, his boat then laid up in the ice, "to make this once more and let me know when, and then he may go to heaven."
Most of us have heard something like that in a sarcastic mood, but this was a jolly bon vivant, and was being helped the second time, so before "that cook" started to heaven, I prevailed upon him to abstract and perfect out of the chaos of his guesswork the following receipt.
Two separate breads sit in this passage: a scalded cornmeal hoe cake and, further down, a steamed brown bread with its own ingredient list. Both are hotel-scale, so read the quantities before you commit.
- Scale it down firstTwo pounds of white cornmeal is roughly 6 1/2 to 7 cups, and half a pound of lard a little over 1 cup — enough hoe cakes for a hotel dining room. A quarter batch is about 1 3/4 cups meal, 1/4 cup lard, 1/4 teaspoon salt.
- The hinge: scald the mealThe boiling water is called for to melt the lard, but it also gelatinizes some of the starch, which helps the cakes hold together without wheat flour or egg. Note the recipe specifies only a little boiling water, so only part of the meal is scalded. Add the cold water or milk after the meal has taken up the hot water.
- Indian mealThe term used later in the passage simply means cornmeal. Use stone-ground white cornmeal if you can find it; different meals take up liquid differently, so hold back some of the cold liquid and judge by the batter.
- "Thin mush"Aim for a batter that drops from a spoon and spreads a little on its own — looser than a drop biscuit, stiffer than pancake batter. It should be spreadable with the back of the spoon, as directed.
- The "hoe"The name is traditionally traced to cooking on a flat iron blade set over coals, though that account is folk etymology rather than documented history. A heavy cast-iron griddle or skillet at medium heat is the equivalent; the book gives no temperature. Grease it lightly and cook until the crust is well browned and crisp.
- A contradiction in the textThe commentary claims this bread "contains no shortening," which does not describe the recipe printed above it — Whitehead is drifting into general remarks about southern corn breads. The half pound of lard belongs in the hoe cakes and is what gives them their crisp edge.
- The steamed brown breadFour heaping teaspoons of baking powder, a half pint of molasses, and 4 lb of combined meal and flour yield 8 lb of bread, as the recipe states. The purpose-made stovepipe pails can be replaced by greased tins or basins covered tightly with foil, set on a rack in a covered pot with water halfway up the sides — but 8 lb of batter needs far more capacity than a pair of 1-quart basins, so use larger tins or scale the batch down. Whitehead's own direction is 4 to 6 hours' steaming, then a short bake to form a crust.
- "Re-boiled, black molasses"This probably means dark or blackstrap molasses boiled down again to concentrate it; the text does not define the term. Dark unsulphured molasses works; light molasses will give a paler, milder loaf.
Hoecake and bannock are two names for the same idea from opposite sides of the Atlantic: a flat unleavened cake cooked on a hot surface rather than in an oven. The American name is generally traced to field cooking on the blade of a hoe, and by the nineteenth century it covered any thin cornmeal cake baked on a griddle or a board propped before the fire. Whitehead's aside about the Chicago fire dates the anecdote to before 1871 and places the whole passage where his books usually sit — in a commercial hotel kitchen, feeding seventy-five at a meal, where the cook's job was as much managing appetite as producing bread. His jab at "the eastern idea" that cornmeal needs wheat or rye to make a loaf is a small piece of regional argument: New England ate its corn steamed and sweetened with molasses in the brown-bread manner, while southern and western cooks treated scalded meal as bread in its own right.