Home › Cereals, Batters and Doughs › Corn Cakes
Corn Cakes
1 1/2 cups flour. 1 cup cornmeal. 4 teaspoons baking powder. 1/4 cup sugar. 1½ teaspoons salt 1½ cups boiling water ¼ cup cornmeal 2 tablespoons melted fat ¼ cup milk 4 teaspoons baking 1 cup sugar 1 egg powder Add meal to boiling water and boil 5 minutes; turn into bowl, add milk and remaining dry ingredients mixed and sifted, then the egg well beaten, and fat. Cook same as other griddle cakes.
A scalded-meal griddle cake: the cornmeal is cooked to a mush first, which softens the grain and gives a tender cake rather than a gritty one. The ingredient list has been scrambled by the book's two-column typesetting, so read it carefully before you start.
- The garbled listThe columns have run together. Read it as: 1 cup cornmeal, 1½ cups boiling water, 1½ teaspoons salt, 1 cup milk, 4 teaspoons baking powder, 2 tablespoons melted fat, 1 egg. No flour is listed, and "1 cup sugar" is hard to credit — a cup of sugar in a batter this size would be cloying, and it may be a misprint. Treat the sugar quantity as uncertain.
- Scald the meal properlyThis is the hinge. Stir the meal into hard-boiling salted water and cook five minutes, stirring, until it is a thick mush that pulls from the pan. Underdone meal leaves the cakes sandy; the whole point of the method is full hydration of the grain.
- Cool before the eggLet the mush drop below hand-hot after the milk goes in. Adding a beaten egg to near-boiling mush will curdle it into threads.
- Baking powderFour teaspoons is a lot by modern eyes, but the batter is heavy with cooked mush and needs the lift. Use double-acting powder and cook the batter within about twenty minutes of mixing.
- CornmealUse plain stone-ground or degerminated yellow or white meal, not self-rising cornmeal (which already contains leavening and salt) and not corn flour or masa harina.
- "Melted fat"In a household book of this kind this means lard, bacon drippings or a vegetable shortening. Melted butter or a neutral oil works; bacon fat suits it if you leave out any sugar.
- Griddle heat and consistencyMedium heat (the book gives no temperature), lightly greased. The batter should pour thickly and spread slowly; loosen with milk a spoonful at a time if it mounds. Turn once, when the surface bubbles set and the edges look dry.
- YieldAbout fourteen to sixteen cakes of four inches, enough for four people.
The Metropolitan Cook Book was not sold but given away: Metropolitan Life Insurance Company distributed it to policyholders from the 1910s onward, part of a broad campaign linking household thrift, nutrition and public health to the sale of industrial life insurance. That explains the flat, unornamented style of entries like this one — cheap staples, plain method, no rhetoric. Scalded cornmeal batters themselves are far older than the book, descending from the mush-and-hoecake cookery that carried cornmeal through American kitchens before wheat flour was cheap everywhere; boiling the meal first was the standard way to make a coarse grain palatable. The addition of wheat flour, milk, egg and baking powder here is the twentieth-century compromise, a hybrid cake that behaves like a pancake while keeping the corn flavour.