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Indian Meal Cakes
Indian meal cakes are especially excellent made of the sweet meal fresh from the mill. Take two cupfuls of cornmeal and one cupful of wheat flour. Mix them with three cups of sour milk and let them stand over night for the meal to swell. In the morning add a tablespoonful of sugar and an even half teaspoonful of salt, two well beaten eggs, and an even teaspoonful of soda dissolved in a tablespoonful of boiling water. Beat the batter thoroughly and bake the cakes. They should be about a quarter of an inch thick. Some meals swell more than others, and if the cakes are thicker than this, thin them with sweet milk. Indian meal cakes require longer baking than buckwheat cakes.
Another way of making Indian meal cakes is with sweet milk, when two even teaspoonfuls of cream tartar should be added with the soda to the cornmeal and flour and sifted through it. Do not mix the cakes over night, when sweet milk is used.
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An overnight cornmeal griddle batter leavened by the reaction of sour milk and soda. The soak is the point: it hydrates the meal so the cakes cook through without grittiness.
- Indian mealPlain cornmeal, yellow or white. Stone-ground meal generally soaks up more liquid than degerminated supermarket meal, and the recipe itself allows that "some meals swell more than others."
- Sour milkNot spoiled milk from the refrigerator. Use buttermilk, or whole milk soured with a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar per cup and left 10 minutes. Modern pasteurized milk left out does not sour the way raw milk did; it simply goes bad.
- "Bake" means griddleHere baking a cake means cooking it on a hot, lightly greased griddle or heavy skillet; the recipe gives no temperature, and a medium-hot griddle is what is meant.
- Soda dissolved in boiling waterDissolving the soda before it goes in prevents yellow-brown bitter specks in the finished cakes. Add it last, stir just enough to combine, and cook promptly — the lift starts immediately.
- Sweet milkPlain unsoured milk. In the alternate version the cream of tartar supplies the acid the sour milk would have given, which is why that batter must not stand overnight.
- Thickness and timingA quarter inch is thin, so the batter should pour and spread. The recipe notes only that these cakes need longer baking than buckwheat cakes; give them extra time so the centers do not stay raw and pasty.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; three cups of milk with three cups of meal and flour makes a large batch of thin cakes, ample for four.
"Indian meal" was the standard American term for cornmeal well into the twentieth century, distinguishing the native grain from "meal" or "flour" meaning wheat; it survives in the name Indian pudding. The insistence on meal "fresh from the mill" reflects a real difference: whole cornmeal retains the oily germ, which goes rancid within weeks, so cooks who lived near a working grist mill genuinely ate better cornbread than those buying it from a grocer's barrel. The overnight soak with sour milk is an older technique than chemical leavening, and this recipe shows the two systems overlapping — a long soak for texture, then soda for lift, with cream of tartar standing in when no soured milk is on hand.