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Carolina Flapjacks
One quart boiling milk, two cups white Indian meal, one small cup flour, one table-spoon each butter and brown sugar, one teaspoon soda dissolved in hot milk, one tea-spoon salt, two eggs; scald meal with the hot milk, cool a little, and add butter and sugar, and let stand until morning, covered closely; then add yolks of eggs, salt and flour. If batter is too thick, thin with cold milk before adding soda, and, last, lightly stir in the well-beaten whites. -Mrs. David Anderson, Charleston, S. C.
A scalded-cornmeal batter set overnight, closer to a spoonbread than a modern pancake. The mush must be properly cooled before the eggs go in, or the yolks will curdle in the bowl.
- White Indian mealIndian meal is cornmeal; "white" specifies white corn, standard in the Carolina Lowcountry and still sold as fine or medium white cornmeal. Stone-ground gives the best flavour but drinks more liquid, so expect a stiffer overnight sponge.
- Quart of boiling milkTwo cups of meal to four cups of milk sounds thin, but the meal swells overnight into a thick mush. Pour the milk boiling over the meal and stir hard to avoid lumps, exactly as for grits.
- The overnight standThe original says only to cover the bowl closely and leave it until morning; it gives no location or temperature. Refrigerate it instead: a milk-and-meal porridge held at room temperature for eight hours is a good growth medium, and chilling costs nothing in texture. Let it come back toward room temperature before you thin and cook it.
- Soda without acidA teaspoon of soda has little to react with here beyond the trace acidity of the brown sugar, unless the batter has soured slightly overnight, which was likelier in an 1880s kitchen than a refrigerated one. In a fridge-set batter the soda mainly raises the pH, giving browning and a faint alkaline tang; the real lift comes from the beaten whites. Half a teaspoon is plenty if you dislike that taste.
- Order of workThin the batter with cold milk to a thick but pourable consistency before the soda goes in, as written, then fold the whites in last and cook promptly. The whites are the leavening and they deflate if the batter sits.
- Griddle heatThe recipe specifies none; medium, in the region of 350-375F, works, and allow a little longer per side than for a wheat pancake. Cornmeal cakes need the extra minute to set through, and a hot griddle will colour the outside before the middle is done.
- YieldTwo dozen or more cakes of three or four inches, depending on how thin the batter is run; enough for six.
The Dixie Cook-Book (1883) is largely a Southern reworking of Estelle Woods Wilcox's Buckeye Cookery, with contributed signatures attached, and the signature -- Mrs. David Anderson of Charleston -- is doing real work: it marks this as a Lowcountry cake, from a region where white corn, not yellow, was the everyday grain and where scalded meal turned up in spoonbread, awendaw and hominy cakes alike. The overnight rest is the older method, predating reliable chemical leavening: soaking coarse meal in scalded milk softens the hull and gelatinises the starch so the cake is tender rather than gritty, and any slight souring gave the soda something to work against. "Flapjack" is an old English word for a griddle cake, in print by the early seventeenth century -- Shakespeare's Pericles of 1608 is the familiar early citation -- and in nineteenth-century American cookbooks it is used more or less interchangeably with griddle-cake and batter-cake rather than for anything distinct.