Home › Bread › Johnnie Cake (Two eggs three cupfuls)
Johnnie Cake (Two eggs three cupfuls)
Two eggs, three cupfuls buttermilk or sour milk, onehalf cupful of lard, one-half cupful sugar, one cupful flour, one teaspoonful saleratus (or soda), one-half teaspoonful salt, three cupfuls of cornmeal.
The original gives quantities only, in the terse style common to bread chapters of the period, so the method has to be reconstructed. The proportions themselves are sound: equal parts cornmeal and buttermilk by volume, with flour at one third the meal.
- SaleratusSaleratus is the period name for the chemical leaven, originally potassium bicarbonate and by the later nineteenth century usually sodium bicarbonate, i.e. baking soda; the recipe glosses it as "soda" itself. One teaspoon is on the light side for three cups of buttermilk but workable; the acid in the milk is what raises the bread, so do not substitute sweet milk without adding baking powder.
- LardHalf a cup of lard, melted and cooled slightly before it goes in. Unsalted butter or a neutral oil works, though lard gives the crisper edge that this style of cornbread is made for.
- CornmealUse stone-ground yellow or white meal, not the degerminated fine grind sold as cornbread mix and not masa harina. Three cups of coarse meal will drink the buttermilk; let the batter stand ten minutes before baking so the grains hydrate.
- AssemblyBeat the eggs, add buttermilk, sugar and melted lard, then stir the dry ingredients together and combine quickly. Stop when the meal is wet. Overworking a batter leavened only by soda and acid loses the lift.
- Pan and ovenA greased 9x13 inch pan or two 9 inch skillets. The original gives no oven direction; bake at 400-425F for 25 to 35 minutes, until the centre is set and the edges pull from the pan. Heating a cast-iron skillet with the fat in it before pouring the batter gives the best crust.
- YieldRoughly a 9x13 pan, twelve to fifteen squares. Best eaten warm the day it is made; it dries fast, as all high-meal cornbreads do.
- SweetnessHalf a cup of sugar for three cups of meal is a Northern proportion and reads sweet against Southern cornbread, which often has none. Cut it to a quarter cup if you want the bread to sit beside meat rather than under butter and syrup.
Johnnycake belongs to the oldest layer of American cooking, a cornmeal bread adapted from Native practice by colonists along the Atlantic coast, and the earliest versions were thin batters baked on a board or griddle rather than in a pan. The name's origin is disputed: it is variously said to come from "journey cake," from "jonakin," or from a corruption of "Shawnee cake," and none of these is documented well enough to settle the matter. The version recorded in this book is a soft, egg-and-buttermilk loaf baked in the oven, sweetened and enriched with lard in a way the plain colonial batter never was.