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Cornmeal Pones
Put one pound yellow Indian cornmeal flour in a basin with two gills boiling water, thoroughly mix with a wooden spoon, then let raise for fifteen minutes or until dry. Crack in a fresh egg, add a tablespoon butter and half teaspoon salt and briskly beat up for five minutes. Pour in a gill of milk, adding half teaspoon soda; briskly mix again until very smooth. Lightly butter a small pastry tin, spread the preparation over the tin, neatly smooth the surface and lightly butter the top; place in the oven for thirty minutes. Remove, cut into six equal pieces and serve. (While in New Orleans I noticed that cornmeal pones were never absent from the breakfast tables of the hotels, and was informed that they are considered excellent, and are very popular breakfast delicacies in private families, not only in New Orleans but all over the state.)
A stiff scalded-cornmeal batter baked flat and cut into squares, written in the compressed style of a professional chef's notebook. Two things need attention before you start: the liquid ratio and the missing oven temperature.
- The liquid is shortA pound of cornmeal is roughly 3 cups; two gills of boiling water plus a gill of milk is only 1 1/2 cups of liquid, which will not hydrate it into anything spreadable. Expect to add water or milk by the quarter-cup until you have a thick but spreadable paste. This is the one place the original cannot be followed literally.
- GillsA gill is half a cup. Two gills of boiling water is 1 cup; a gill of milk is 1/2 cup.
- Indian cornmeal flourPlain yellow cornmeal, finely ground. "Indian meal" was a standard American term for maize meal through the nineteenth century and still turns up later. Fine grind works better here than a coarse stone-ground meal, which stays gritty in a batter this dry.
- "Let raise for fifteen minutes"Nothing is rising; this is the scald resting so the meal swells and absorbs the boiling water. It should stiffen and cool enough to take an egg without scrambling it.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A flat pan of cornmeal batter about half an inch thick suits a fairly hot oven, somewhere in the region of 400-425F; check it before the 30 minutes stated.
- The sodaHalf a teaspoon of soda with sweet milk has little acid to react with and may leave a faint soapy, yellowish note. Sour milk and buttermilk were common at the time, and buttermilk in place of the milk would supply the missing acid, though the recipe as written specifies plain milk.
- Pastry tinA shallow rimmed metal pan, not a deep casserole. An 8- or 9-inch square tin gives the right thickness for six pieces; a quarter sheet pan spreads it too thin.
- YieldSix squares, enough for three or four at breakfast. Best eaten hot from the pan with butter; they stiffen and dry as they cool.
Pone comes from the Algonquian appone or apan, a word for baked bread that English colonists picked up in the Chesapeake in the seventeenth century and applied to any flat cake of maize meal cooked without yeast. By the time this book was compiled the term had settled firmly in Southern usage, and the parenthetical note reports back from New Orleans, where pones were found on the hotels' breakfast tables, with their popularity in private families given only at second hand. What was recorded is a version of the plain thing, with butter, egg and a soda leavening, baked in a pastry tin and cut in squares rather than shaped by hand into oval lumps.