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Johnnie Cake (II)
Edith.
Scald the meal at night; let it stand where it will keep slightly warm until morning; then, for any ordinary four quart panful, add sufficient sour milk to render the right consistency-generally a large teacupful is enough; saleratus, one tablespoonful; salt, at time of scalding the meal; if the meal is very fine, do not use boiling water
A plain overnight johnnycake with no eggs, no sugar and no fat: the whole structure comes from scalded meal, soured milk and saleratus. The original assumes you know the rest, so here are the missing numbers.
- Saleratus is baking sodaSaleratus is the period chemical leaven -- early saleratus was potassium bicarbonate, later sodium bicarbonate -- so modern baking soda is a close stand-in in roughly equal measure. Treat the tablespoon as an upper limit rather than a target: soda only tastes clean if there is enough acid to neutralise it, and with a single teacupful of sour milk a tablespoon is likely to leave a soapy, faintly metallic edge. A common modern rule of thumb is about half a teaspoon to a teaspoon of soda per cup of buttermilk.
- A large teacupfulA Victorian teacup is smaller than a modern mug: reckon 1/2 to 3/4 cup. Since the amount is defined by consistency rather than volume, add it gradually until the batter is thick but pourable, like a heavy pancake batter.
- Four quart panfulThe phrase is ambiguous: it may mean the capacity of the pan or the bulk of scalded meal it holds. Either way it indicates a large household batch, so scale the sour milk and saleratus to the amount of meal you actually scald rather than to fixed figures.
- Sour milkCultured buttermilk is the direct modern replacement and behaves more predictably than the original, which was simply milk left to turn. Plain yogurt thinned with milk works as well. Fresh milk soured with lemon juice or vinegar is a rougher stand-in but will still supply the acid.
- The overnight standScalding hydrates the meal and softens the bran so the crumb is tender rather than gritty. In a period kitchen the pot sat near the banked fire; in a modern one, cover it and leave it at cool room temperature, or refrigerate it and let it come back toward room temperature before mixing. Left genuinely warm all night, as the original directs, it will sour and bubble on its own, which changes the flavour.
- Fine meal, cooler waterThe warning at the end matters. Finely ground, degerminated supermarket cornmeal gelatinises fast and boiling water turns it to a stiff paste that will not take up the milk. Use hot tap or barely steaming water for fine meal, and save the boiling water for stone-ground or coarse.
- Salt at the scaldingFollow this literally. Salt stirred into the meal while it is being scalded distributes evenly; added the next morning to a stiff porridge it stays in streaks.
- Oven and panNo temperature is given because none could be. Bake in a well-greased, preheated pan at 425F for 25 to 30 minutes, until the top is set and the edges pull away. A hot pan and a hot oven give the crisp bottom crust that is the point of the dish.
Johnnycake is a long-established cornbread in English-speaking America, and by the time this book was compiled the name covered everything from a thin cake baked on a board before the fire to the sweetened, egg-rich pan bread most people now expect. The version here belongs to the older, plainer tradition: no eggs, no sugar, no wheat flour, just meal, water, sour milk and saleratus, with the overnight scald doing the work that fat and eggs do in a modern recipe. The name's origin is disputed and often traced to "journey cake" or to a corruption of an Indigenous word, though neither derivation is documented. What is documented is the domestic logic behind it: sour milk was a daily by-product in a house that kept its own milk, saleratus was the cheap chemical leaven of the mid-nineteenth century, and setting the meal to soak overnight meant breakfast could be in the oven within minutes of the fire being built up. The recipe comes down to us attached to the name "Edith," and no more than that.