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Bannocks
M.
One pint corn meal, pour on it boiling water to thoronghly wet it. Let it stand a few minutes; add salt and one egg and a little sweet cream, or a tablespoon melted butter. Make into balls and fry in hot lard.
A scalded cornmeal dough fried in fat — closer to a hushpuppy than to the flat griddle bannock of Scotland. The whole recipe hinges on the scalding step, which gelatinizes the starch so the balls hold together without flour or leavening.
- A pint of corn mealMeasured by volume, not weight: about 2 cups, roughly 10 oz. Use plain stone-ground yellow or white cornmeal, not a self-rising cornmeal mix and not coarse polenta.
- Boiling water, and how muchThe original gives no quantity because the meal is wetted by eye. Expect somewhere near 1 to 1 1/4 cups of hard-boiling water for 2 cups of meal — enough that the mash is stiff but not soupy. Let it sit the few minutes it asks for; the meal keeps absorbing and a batter that looks slack will firm up.
- Sweet creamSimply fresh, unsoured cream, as distinct from soured cream, which was also commonly kept in nineteenth-century kitchens. Heavy or whipping cream is the direct substitute; a couple of tablespoons is plenty.
- Add the egg last, and cool firstBeat the egg in only after the scalded meal has stopped steaming, or it will scramble in the bowl. Salt at roughly 1 teaspoon for this quantity.
- Frying in hot lardDeep or shallow fry at 350–365F. Below that the balls soak fat and fall apart; much above it and the outside colors before the center sets. Lard gives the intended flavor, but any neutral high-smoke-point fat works.
- ShapingWet or greased hands stop the mash sticking. Keep the balls to about golf-ball size — larger ones stay pasty inside. Fry in batches so the fat temperature does not crash.
- Time and yieldThree to four minutes, turning, until deep gold all round. Two cups of meal makes about 14 to 18 balls, enough for four to six as a bread with soup, stew or greens.
"Bannock" is a Scots and northern English word for a flat unleavened cake baked on a girdle, and it traveled to North America with Scottish settlers, where it attached itself to whatever grain was at hand — oats, barley, wheat, and here corn. This version has lost the girdle entirely: it is scalded cornmeal fried in lard, a technique that runs through American regional cooking under a dozen names, from hoecake to corn dodger to hushpuppy, all built on the same principle that boiling water turns cornmeal into a dough that will hold a shape. Community cookbooks of the 1870s and 1880s, of which The Home Cook Book is an early and much-imitated example, printed recipes as contributors submitted them, initials and all, and left much — here the quantities of water and cream — to the cook's judgment rather than spelling it out.