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Corn Dodgers
To one quart corn meal add a little salt and a small table-spoon lard; scald with boiling water and beat hard for a few minutes; drop a large spoonful in a well-greased pan. The batter should be thick enough to just flatten on the bottom, leaving them quite high in the center. Bake in a hot oven.
A scalded-meal batter with almost nothing in it: the technique carries the whole dish, so the details of the scalding and the pan matter more than the ingredient list.
- The hinge: scald properlyBoiling water — not hot tap water — poured over the meal gelatinizes the starch and is the only thing holding these together, since there is no egg, milk or leavening. Add the water gradually while stirring, then beat hard for a full two or three minutes so the mass turns cohesive and slightly glossy.
- A quart of mealA quart of meal is roughly 4 to 4½ cups of cornmeal, or something over a pound. It makes a large batch — perhaps eighteen to twenty-four dodgers. Halving it is sensible for a household of two or three.
- "A hot oven""Hot oven" is usually read as somewhere around 425 to 450F. Dodgers want fast heat to set the crust before the inside dries out; figure 20 to 25 minutes, until the bottoms are deep brown and the tops are firm and pale gold.
- The meal itselfSouthern cornmeal of this period was typically stone-ground and often from white corn, less uniform and more absorbent than modern degerminated yellow meal. Stone-ground white meal gives the closest texture; with a commercial degerminated meal you may need slightly less water.
- LardA tablespoon of lard for a quart of meal is barely a slick — it is there for tenderness, not richness. Bacon drippings are a common substitute; butter or a neutral oil will work, though lard gives the characteristic flavor.
- Greasing the pan"Well-greased" likely means a cast-iron pan or griddle with lard in it; heating the greased pan first, so the batter sizzles on contact, is what produces a crisp underside, while a cold, lightly oiled sheet pan gives a pale, soft-bottomed result.
- Batter consistencyAim for a stiff drop batter that holds a peak. If a spoonful spreads flat, beat in more meal; if it will not flatten at all, a spoonful more boiling water. The high domed center is the point — crust outside, steamy inside.
- ServingEat them hot, split, with butter, or alongside greens and pot likker, beans or fried meat. They harden quickly as they cool.
Corn dodgers belong to the plainest branch of the American cornbread family — meal, salt, fat, water, no eggs and no rising — the same lineage as ashcake, hoecake and the journey cake of the older cookbooks. The name is generally traced to the way the stiff dough was "dodged" or dabbed into the pan by the spoonful, though the etymology is traditional rather than settled. The dish's virtue was that it required nothing a frontier or plantation kitchen might be out of: no buttermilk, no soda, no eggs, only meal and boiling water. The Dixie Cook-Book (1883), a Southern-marketed compilation from the same publishing effort behind the widely circulated Buckeye Cookery, includes it among its recipes — bread made in minutes and eaten hot, when nothing had been left to rise overnight.