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Johnson's Spanks
1/2 pint (I cup) cornmeal 1 egg 1/4 lb. (1 cup) flour 1/4 teaspoonful salt 2 teaspoonfuls baking ½ pint (1 cup) milk powder Water Mix the cornmeal with the flour, add the baking powder, egg well beaten, salt, milk and a very little water to make a nice batter. Beat for two minutes, then drop from the spoon into smoking hot fat, and fry until nicely browned. Serve at once.
This is a delicious breakfast bread and is known, for some unaccountable reason, as Johnson's Spanks.
The ingredient list has been scrambled by two-column typesetting; read it as 1 cup cornmeal, 1 cup flour, 2 teaspoons baking powder, 1 egg, 1/4 teaspoon salt, 1 cup milk, and water as needed. What you are making is a fried cornmeal batter cake, closer to a hush puppy than a pancake.
- Batter consistency is the hinge"A nice batter" here means thick enough to hold its shape when dropped from a spoon, not pourable. Add the water a tablespoon at a time; if the batter slackens it will spread and flatten in the fat instead of puffing.
- UnitsA half pint is one cup, as the recipe itself notes. The quarter pound of flour is about 1 cup of modern all-purpose flour by weight, so the parenthetical holds well enough.
- CornmealCornmeal of the period was stone-ground and often coarser than today's degerminated meal; white was common in the South, yellow elsewhere. Either works, and a medium grind gives a grittier result.
- "Smoking hot fat"A visual cue rather than a measured one, and hotter than modern oils want. Fry at 360-375F in 1 1/2 to 2 inches of neutral oil, turning as needed, until browned through, roughly 2-3 minutes.
- Don't crowd the panFour or five at a time in a deep skillet. Each addition drops the oil temperature, and cold fat means greasy, dense cakes.
- Beat two minutes, then stopThe beating aerates the batter and works in the egg. Fry soon after mixing; a batter of this period, leavened with a single-acting powder, loses lift if left standing.
- Yield and servingThe quantities make a modest batch of spoon-sized cakes. They are meant hot from the fat, with butter, syrup, or alongside bacon and eggs; fried batters of this kind toughen as they cool.
Fried spoon-dropped cornmeal batters run all through nineteenth-century American cookery under a scatter of local names — hush puppies, corn dodgers, fritters — and the naming is nearly always regional rather than traceable to a person. The author's own admission that the dish is called Johnson's Spanks "for some unaccountable reason" is the honest position, and it is a useful reminder that many such names arrived in print already detached from whatever household or cook first attached them. What is documented is the technique's dependence on chemical leavening: baking powder became widely available to American home cooks in the second half of the century, joining the saleratus and pearlash that had leavened cornmeal batters before it, and its arrival turned such batters into a five-minute breakfast bread. The half-pint and quarter-pound measures alongside cup equivalents suggest, though they do not settle the matter, that this book belongs to the transitional decades when American kitchens were shifting from weight and liquid measure to the standardized cup.