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Corn Meal Griddle Cakes
One-half pint of corn meal; one-half pint of flour; one pint of boiling water; one and one-half cups of sweet milk; one teaspoon of baking powder; one teaspoon of salt; two eggs. Put the meal, sugar, and salt in a mixing bowl, and pour over them the boiling water. Beat thoroughly, and add the cold milk. When the mixture is quite cool stir in the flour and baking powder, mixing well; and lastly add the eggs, well beaten. The cakes should be small, well browned and thoroughly cooked, and they need a little longer frying than wheat griddle cakes.
A scalded-meal batter, which is what makes these worth the extra step: boiling water softens the cornmeal so the finished cakes are tender rather than gritty. The ingredient list and the method do not quite agree, so read both before you start.
- The missing sugarThe method tells you to put "the meal, sugar, and salt" in the bowl, but no sugar appears in the list of ingredients. A tablespoon is a reasonable reading for a pint of meal; the cakes work without it, though they brown less readily.
- Half a pint is one cupSo: 1 cup cornmeal, 1 cup flour, 2 cups boiling water, 1½ cups milk. The batter is loose by modern pancake standards and will spread on the griddle.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, specified because many period recipes call for sour milk or buttermilk paired with saleratus. Whole milk is the closest match.
- Let it cool before the leavening and eggsThis is the hinge. Adding baking powder to a hot batter spends its lift before the cakes hit the pan, and hot batter will scramble the eggs. Wait until the mixture is no more than warm to the touch.
- Cornmeal grindPeriod meal was generally a medium stone grind, coarser than the fine degerminated yellow meal sold in most supermarkets. A stone-ground medium meal gives the texture the recipe assumes; fine meal makes a smoother, softer cake.
- Standing timeIf the batter thickens noticeably while cooling, thin it with a little milk. Cornmeal keeps absorbing liquid as it sits.
- CookingA moderate griddle rather than the hotter setting used for wheat cakes. The instruction to keep them small and fry a little longer is sound: cornmeal batter browns before its centre sets, and a small cake given the extra time cooks through where a large one will not.
- YieldNot stated in the recipe.
Cornmeal griddle cakes sit at the point where a native American grain met an English batter tradition, and by the time printed household cook books were treating them as ordinary fare the combination was thoroughly domesticated rather than a regional curiosity. The scalding step is the oldest thing in the recipe: pouring boiling water over cornmeal to swell it is the same principle behind mush, hasty pudding and johnnycake, and it survived into leavened batters because corn has no gluten and needs the softening to escape a sandy texture. The baking powder, by contrast, is modern for its moment. Chemical leavening in a convenient premixed tin only became a general household staple over the second half of the nineteenth century, displacing the saleratus-and-sour-milk pairing that earlier cornmeal cake recipes often used.