Johny Cake, or Hoe Cake

History

A johnny cake, or hoe cake, is cornbread pared to its essentials: an unleavened batter of cornmeal, salt, and water, cooked until firm. Amelia Simmons sets it down in two forms. In the first, a pint of scalded milk is stirred into three pints of Indian meal with half a pint of wheat flour, and the cake is baked before the fire. In the second, two-thirds of the meal is scalded with milk or wet with boiling water, then salt, molasses, and shortening are worked in and the whole brought together pretty stiff with cold water before baking the same way. To bake it before the fire was to set the cake facing the open hearth rather than in an oven; Indian meal was simply the eighteenth-century name for cornmeal.

The cake is older than any cookbook that holds it. Cornmeal cookery of this kind is credited to the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, who taught European settlers to grind and cook ground corn, and the Narragansett are said to have made such cakes in New England as far back as the 1600s. American Cookery was the first cookbook to put the New England johnnycake into print, and Simmons's is the earliest printed recipe for it.

The names are where the record splinters. Johnny cake is first attested in 1739; the variant journey cake, often taken to be the older and more romantic form, is recorded only from 1775. One line of descent runs through Jonakin, noted in New England in 1765, from the northern English jannock of the sixteenth century; another proposes a slurring of Shawnee cake, which some writers reject. Hoe cake is no steadier. The term appears by 1745, and by one account it named the food for the iron implement it was baked on. A popular story holds that the name came from the practice of enslaved people cooking the cakes on the blades of field hoes, though the field-hoe image is more memorable as a story than it is verifiable as history; Rod Cofield instead traces hoe to a colloquial English word for a griddle, in use in parts of England by the 1600s.

What the record does not settle, it leaves open. No single origin for either name can be documented over the others, and the sources that reach for the field-hoe image reach past the evidence. Simmons wrote down a cake already shared between Indigenous and settler kitchens, whose very name gathers stories the evidence cannot finally sort — and in fixing the recipe she preserved it far better than the account of how it came by its two names.

Ingredients

• 1 pint milk
• 3 pints cornmeal
• 0.5 pint flour
• salt
• molasses
• shortening

Instructions

1. Scald one pint of milk and add it to three pints of Indian (corn) meal and half a pint of flour.
2. Bake before the fire.
3. Alternatively, scald two thirds of the Indian meal with milk, or wet two thirds with boiling water.
4. Add salt, molasses and shortening, and work up with cold water pretty stiff.
5. Bake as above.