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White Corn Meal Cake
1 cup scalded milk 1/2 cup white corn meal 1 teaspoon salt Add salt to corn meal, and pour on gradually milk. Turn into a buttered shallow pan to the depth of one-fourth inch. Bake in a moderate oven until crisp. Split and spread with butter. 1 cup flour ¼ teaspoon salt
A very plain scalded-meal batter baked thin and crisp, closer to a cracker or a pan-baked hoecake than a cake in the modern sense. It stands or falls on the thinness of the layer.
- Depth is the whole recipeA quarter inch is not approximate. Poured thicker, the middle stays soft and pasty rather than drying to a crisp sheet, and no amount of extra oven time fixes it.
- Moderate ovenUsually taken as somewhere around 350 to 375F. Timing will vary a good deal with how thin you spread it; go by colour and rigidity, since the instruction is "until crisp" rather than a time.
- White corn mealWhite meal, finely ground, was used for cakes of this type, though yellow meal was also common in New England kitchens. Yellow meal works but gives a stronger flavour and a coarser bite; stone-ground meal will absorb more liquid than degerminated supermarket meal.
- Scalded milkMilk brought just to steaming, small bubbles at the edge, not a boil. The hot liquid begins to soften and swell the meal, which helps the batter hold together in the pan; cold milk is likely to give a grittier, wetter result.
- Pour on graduallyAdd the hot milk to the salted meal in a slow stream while stirring, or the meal lumps. The finished batter should be thin enough to flow and level itself in the pan.
- Pan and liningA shallow rimmed pan of about 8 or 9 inches square gives roughly the quarter-inch depth from this quantity; a full 9 by 13 sheet would spread it far thinner. Butter it well, or use parchment, since a thin corn sheet grips bare metal.
- Splitting"Split" makes sense only if the layer puffs slightly; with a genuinely thin bake you will more likely break it into rough pieces and butter the top while hot.
- YieldOne cup of milk and half a cup of meal makes enough for two to four people at breakfast, and it is best eaten within the hour. It softens as it stands.
Scalded corn meal baked or griddled without leavening is one of the oldest American breads, often traced to the meal cakes colonists learned to make from Native cooks and known regionally as hoecake, ashcake, journey cake or corn pone. Plain corn cakes of this kind persisted in cookbooks alongside newer baking-powder muffins, partly because they were cheap and quick and partly because they were what a cook was expected to know. White meal was said to be preferred for table bread in some regions, though yellow meal was widely eaten as well. The instruction to bake it thin and crisp, then split and butter it, points to its use as a substitute for toast rather than as a cake course.