Corn Cakes
Sour milk stirred thick with about equal quantities of cornmeal and flour, at night. In the morning thin with sweet milk, add soda, salt and a little sugar. Bake on a hot griddle in small round cakes.
An overnight-risen griddle cake that leans on the reaction between soured milk and soda rather than on yeast or baking powder. The original assumes you know what a pancake batter should look like, and gives no quantities at all.
- Sour milkThis meant milk that had clabbered naturally; pasteurised milk lacks the same bacteria and is more likely to develop off flavours than to sour cleanly. Use cultured buttermilk, or milk soured with a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar per cup and left to stand ten minutes.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh, unsoured milk. Whole milk gives the closest result to the original.
- A working set of quantitiesThe recipe gives none. As a starting point: 2 cups buttermilk stirred into 1 cup cornmeal and 1 cup flour at night, thinned in the morning with about ½ cup milk, plus ½ teaspoon soda, ½ teaspoon salt and a tablespoon of sugar.
- Soda is the hingeThe soda must go in at the last moment and the batter must reach the griddle promptly. Once it neutralises the acid in the soured milk the lift is spent, and cakes cooked from a batter that has sat around come out flat and faintly soapy.
- The overnight restSoaking the cornmeal is probably much of the point of the night's stand, since dry meal stays gritty in a quick batter, though the overnight souring also develops flavour. Refrigerating the mixture slows but does not stop the souring.
- Batter consistencyThin to the texture of heavy cream. Cornmeal keeps absorbing liquid overnight, so the morning batter will be much stiffer than it was and may take more milk than expected.
- Griddle heatThe book gives no temperature; for griddle cakes a moderately hot surface is generally taken as somewhere around 350–375°F — a drop of water should skitter, not vanish instantly. Cook until the surface is covered with broken bubbles and the edges look dry, then turn once.
- YieldThe quantities above make roughly eighteen small cakes, enough for four at breakfast.
Soured milk and saleratus were the standard leavening of the nineteenth-century American kitchen, and cookbooks of the period often seem to take for granted that a household will have milk on the turn. Corn cakes of this kind are often placed between the cornbread of the South and the wheat pancake of the North: the half-and-half meal-and-flour mixture gives the corn flavour and slight grit without the crumbliness of an all-cornmeal batter. The overnight soak is generally explained as a practical inheritance from the days when cornmeal was coarser and stone-ground, and needed hours of hydration to soften. By the time The Twentieth Century Cook Book appeared, commercial baking powder had been widely available for decades, but soda-and-sour-milk recipes persisted in home books.