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Northern Johnny Cake
2 cups corn-meal
1½ teaspoons salt
2 cups sour milk
2 eggs
2 tablespoons fat
1 teaspoon soda
2 tablespoons sugar, white or 1 tablespoon cold water brown
Cook together the meal, milk, fat, sugar and salt in a double boiler for about twenty minutes. Allow the mixture to cool, then add the well-beaten eggs and the soda dissolved in the water. Bake in a shallow iron or granite pan for about thirty minutes at 400° F.
In case there is not time to cook and cool the meal, the following method of mixing may be used. Mix and sift together the meal, sugar, salt and soda, add the sour milk gradually, then the well-beaten eggs and the melted fat. Bread made by this method does not have as good texture as that made by the first method.
The ingredient column has been scrambled by the original two-column typesetting; read it as 2 cups corn-meal, 1½ teaspoons salt, 2 cups sour milk, 2 eggs, 2 tablespoons fat, 1 teaspoon soda, 2 tablespoons sugar (white or brown), and 1 tablespoon cold water. The method itself is intact and the first version is worth the extra step.
- The scalding is the pointCooking the meal with the milk in a double boiler for twenty minutes hydrates the starch and softens the bran before any leavening goes in, which is why the book says the texture is better. Skip it and the crumb is coarser; the book says only that bread made the quick way "does not have as good texture."
- Sour milkThis means naturally soured raw milk, thick and acidic. Use cultured buttermilk, or 2 cups whole milk with 2 tablespoons lemon juice or white vinegar stirred in and left to stand ten minutes. Sweet milk will leave the soda unneutralised and the bread will taste soapy.
- Soda, not baking powderThe single teaspoon of soda is balanced against the acid in the soured milk. Dissolving it in the tablespoon of cold water at the last moment distributes it evenly through a batter that is by then cold and stiff.
- Cool the mush firstThe cooked meal must be cool enough not to scramble the eggs or spend the soda's lift before the pan reaches the oven. Lukewarm is fine; hot is not.
- Corn-mealMuch period corn-meal was stone-ground and coarser than most supermarket meal. A medium-grind yellow or white meal suits this best; fine degerminated meal will drink less liquid and bake denser.
- FatTwo tablespoons of lard, bacon drippings or butter. In the first method it goes in with the mush; in the second it is melted and added at the end.
- Pan and ovenA shallow 8- or 9-inch iron or enamelled pan, greased and preheated if you want a crisp bottom crust. The recipe gives its own temperature, 400°F, so it needs no translation.
- YieldOne shallow pan, cutting into eight or nine squares. Best eaten warm the day it is baked; it stales quickly, as all corn breads do.
"Johnny cake" covers a wide family of corn breads, and the name is generally traced to journey cake or to a corruption of jonakin, though neither derivation is settled. The "Northern" label here is doing real work: in the South and in Rhode Island a johnny cake was traditionally little more than meal, salt and boiling water cooked on a griddle or board, while Northern versions of this period took on eggs, sugar, soured milk and soda and became a soft, cakey bread baked in a pan. The scalded-meal technique in the first method is older than the chemical leavening beside it, a holdover from the days of hasty pudding and mush, and the frank admission that the quick method gives inferior texture is characteristic of the book's tone: it was written for households that had to choose between doing a thing properly and doing it before supper.