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Cornmeal Dodgers
Place a pint of milk in a saucepan with three saltspoons salt, set on fire, and as soon as it comes to a boil dredge in half pound Indian cornmeal, briskly mixing while adding, then let boil six minutes, lightly stirring at the bottom once in a while. Add one ounce butter, one egg yolk and half saltspoon grated nutmeg, sharply mix for one minute, remove, drop the preparation in a dish and let cool off. Divide the batter into twelve even parts, give them oval-shape forms, place in a lightly buttered baking sheet, lightly baste with a little melted butter and set in a slack oven for twenty minutes. Remove, split them open without detaching, spread a little good butter into each, dress on a dish enveloped in a napkin and serve.
A soft cooked-mush dodger rather than the hard fried kind: the cornmeal is cooked to a stiff polenta first, then shaped and baked. Everything depends on getting that mush thick enough to hold a shape.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. Three of them is about 3/4 teaspoon salt; the half saltspoon of nutmeg is a scant 1/8 teaspoon.
- Indian cornmealPlain yellow or white cornmeal, not self-rising cornmeal mix and not masa. Half a pound is roughly 1 1/2 to 1 3/4 cups depending on grind; a medium grind behaves best here.
- "Set on fire"Set on the fire, meaning over the heat. Use a heavy saucepan, since a pint of milk with cornmeal in it scorches on a thin base.
- Slack ovenA slow oven, somewhere in the region of 300F; period equivalents vary. The dodgers are already cooked through, so the oven only sets and lightly colors the outside.
- The hinge: cook the mush stiffRain the meal in slowly while mixing hard, and give it the full six minutes at a boil as directed. If it is still pourable when you take it off, it will not hold an oval shape and will slump on the sheet. It should pull away from the sides of the pan in a mass.
- Cool before shapingSpread it in a dish and let it cool until firm. Warm mush cannot be divided into twelve neat portions; cool mush shapes cleanly with wet hands.
- Milk and egg quantitiesA pint is two cups. One ounce of butter is two tablespoons; the yolk goes in after the six-minute boil and is mixed sharply for a minute before the pan comes off the heat.
- YieldTwelve dodgers. They stiffen as they cool, so split and butter them straight from the oven, as directed.
Corn dodgers belong to the Southern and frontier American table, where cornmeal, water and salt were often the whole of the bread supply; the name is usually said to come from the small dodges or lumps of dough dropped onto a hot surface, though the derivation is not settled, and the familiar version is a hard little fried or hearth-baked cake. What appears here is that plain thing put through a professional kitchen: enriched with milk, butter, egg yolk and nutmeg, cooked first as a mush in the manner of Italian polenta or French gnocchi de semoule, then shaped, baked gently and sent to table split and buttered in a folded napkin.