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Alabama Johnny Cake
Cook a pint of rice till tender, add a table-spoon butter; when cold add two beaten eggs and one pint meal, and when mixed spread add two beaten eggs and one pint meal, and when mixed spread on an oaken board and bake by tipping the board up before the fireplace. When done on one side turn over. The dough should be spread half an inch thick. -Mrs. Young, Ala.
A hearth bread from before the range: batter spread on a plank and propped up to face an open fire. Everything about the method translates to a hot skillet or a hot oven, but the proportions need reading carefully.
- The pint of riceRead plainly this is a pint of dry rice, roughly 13–14 oz, which cooks up to something like 5–6 cups: far more than a pint of cornmeal will bind. One workable modern reading is a pint (2 cups) of already-cooked rice to a pint of meal, though that is an adjustment, not what the printed text says.
- Meal means cornmealIn a Southern book of this period "meal" almost always means cornmeal, and it would likely have been stone-ground and softer than modern degerminated meal. A fine cornmeal is probably the closest match, though the recipe does not specify colour or grind.
- The duplicated lineThe typesetting repeats "add two beaten eggs and one pint meal." It is a printer's error, not a doubling of the quantities: two eggs and one pint of meal total.
- No salt, no leaveningThe recipe calls for neither, and expects a dense, flat cake. Add about a teaspoon of salt if your rice was cooked unsalted; the eggs are the only lift there is.
- Half an inch, and no thickerThis is the hinge. Spread thicker and the interior stays wet while the face scorches, because all the heat comes from one direction. Half an inch is what lets it cook through before the surface burns.
- Replacing the oaken boardA well-seasoned cast-iron skillet or griddle over medium heat does the same job: five to seven minutes a side, flipped once, until both faces are freckled brown. In an oven, spread on a greased sheet and bake at 425F for about 20 minutes, turning once.
- YieldAs written it makes one large flatbread, enough for four to six at breakfast. Serve hot with butter, sorghum or cane syrup; it stiffens badly as it cools.
"Johnny cake" — recorded in the eighteenth century as journey cake, jonakin and hoecake, with no settled explanation for the name — covers a whole family of cornmeal breads cooked on a hot surface rather than in an oven, and the plank propped before the fire is one of the oldest forms of it, close kin to the ashcake baked directly on the hearth. What marks this version as Deep South is the rice: in Louisiana and the Carolina lowcountry, rice was cheap and local, and cooks are known to have combined it with cornmeal in dishes like rice bread, rice waffles and philpy. Recipes like this one, credited simply to "Mrs. Young, Ala.," are how The Dixie Cook Book was assembled — contributed by name from across the region — and the survival of a fireplace method in a printed book of the 1880s is a reminder that plenty of kitchens buying that book still cooked at an open hearth.