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Fried Corn Cakes
Place in a bowl half a pound cornmeal flour with two tablespoons butter, two saltspoons baking powder, one egg and three tablespoons milk. Beat up with a whisk for two minutes. Lightly butter a large frying pan. Take a tablespoon of the cornmeal preparation and drop into pan; continue doing so till all finished, keeping them a little apart from one another, and fry for four minutes on each side or until of a nice golden colour. Remove, drain on a cloth, dress on a plate and serve.
A short formula that assumes a cook who can judge a batter by eye. The proportions as printed give something closer to a stiff dough than a pourable batter, and that is the point worth settling before you start.
- The liquid is the hingeHalf a pound of cornmeal with only three tablespoons of milk and one egg (perhaps six tablespoons of liquid all told) will not drop from a spoon; it will sit on it. Add milk a tablespoon at a time until the mixture just falls heavily from the spoon, which in practice means several tablespoons more than the recipe gives.
- Weights and small measuresHalf a pound of cornmeal is about 1 1/2 to 1 3/4 cups. A saltspoon is 1/4 teaspoon, so two saltspoons of baking powder is 1/2 teaspoon.
- "Cornmeal flour"This means finely ground meal, not the coarse stone-ground grits-like meal sold for polenta. Fine yellow or white cornmeal works; coarse meal stays gritty because nothing here scalds or soaks it.
- The butterTwo tablespoons of cold butter will not disperse in two minutes of whisking. Soften or melt it and add it with the egg and milk.
- Pan and fat"Lightly butter" over a moderate heat, about medium; butter alone at higher heat will brown and speck the cakes before four minutes are up. Cast iron or a heavy skillet holds the temperature better than thin nonstick.
- TimingFour minutes a side is generous for cakes a tablespoon in size. Judge by colour and by the edges setting; two to three minutes a side is usually enough, and overcooking dries them badly since there is little sugar or fat to keep them tender.
- DrainingDraining on a cloth was standard before paper towels. A rack set over a sheet pan keeps the undersides from steaming soft while the rest fry.
- YieldRoughly twenty small cakes, serving three or four alongside meat or with syrup. They are best within minutes of leaving the pan.
Fried corn cakes belong to a family of griddle breads that runs through American cookery under a dozen names -- johnnycake, hoecake, corn dodger, batter cake -- all resting on the fact that cornmeal, unlike wheat, has no gluten and so needs no kneading, no rising and no oven. That made them the quickest bread available in a kitchen with a hot pan and nothing else, which is why they turn up constantly in nineteenth-century household books. The version here shows the later, tidier form: baking powder rather than the older saleratus and sour milk, butter rather than drippings or salt pork fat, and a measured egg -- standardised into the same tablespoon-and-saltspoon language as everything else in the book.