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Johnnie Cake (One teaspoonful of soda)
One teaspoonful of soda dissolved in one pint of sour milk (with the cream in), one even teaspoonful of salt, one teaspoonful of sugar. Make a batter quite thin of twothirds cornmeal and one-third wheatmeal. Thin batter, so that it will pour into the tins.
A soured-milk cornbread with no oven temperature, no baking time and no flour quantity — the consistency of the batter is the whole instruction. Read the proportions as a ratio and adjust by eye.
- Sour milkThis means naturally clabbered milk, acidic enough to react with the soda. Cultured buttermilk is the usual stand-in for the full pint; ordinary milk soured with vinegar or lemon juice (about a tablespoon per cup) will also serve, though the flavour is flatter.
- "With the cream in"The instruction matters: the milk is unskimmed, so the fat in the recipe comes entirely from the dairy. Whole-milk buttermilk, not the low-fat kind, keeps the crumb from turning dry and crumbly.
- WheatmealA wholemeal or lightly sifted wheat flour, coarser than modern all-purpose. Whole wheat flour is the closer match; white flour makes a lighter, blander cake.
- How much mealNone is specified. For a pint of milk, start with about 2 cups cornmeal to 1 cup wheat flour and thin back with more milk if needed — the batter should pour, not mound, roughly the consistency of heavy cream.
- Soda balanceOne teaspoon of soda to a pint of acidic milk is about right; any more and the cake tastes soapy and turns greenish. Mix the batter and get it into the pan promptly, since the rise begins as soon as soda meets acid.
- Oven and panNo temperature is given. A hot oven, in the region of 425F, suits so thin a batter. Grease shallow tins or a cast-iron pan; heating the pan before the batter goes in is a common way to get a crisp bottom crust, though the recipe does not call for it.
- TimingNo time is given. As a rough guide, a thin batter in shallow tins may take something like 20-25 minutes and a single 9-inch pan a little longer. It is done when the top is browned and the centre springs back.
- YieldA pint of milk makes roughly one 9-inch pan, serving six to eight. Best eaten hot, within the hour — soda cornbreads stale quickly.
Johnnie cake, also spelled johnnycake and jonakin in older American books, covers a wide family of cornmeal breads, from the plain water-and-meal griddle cakes of Rhode Island to raised, milk-enriched batters like this one. The name's origin is disputed and generally traced either to "journey cake," a bread that travelled well, or to an anglicising of an Algonquian word for maize bread; neither derivation is settled. This version does suggest a broad earliest-possible period: soda leavening reacting with sour milk was the standard household shortcut from the mid-nineteenth century onward, when saleratus and then baking soda became cheap and reliable, and it let a cook turn milk that had gone off into hot bread. The mixture of cornmeal with a third wheat flour softens the coarse texture of an all-corn batter.