Plantation Corn Bread or Hoe Cake

History

"Plantation Corn Bread or Hoe Cake" is recipe No. 9 in "What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking" (San Francisco, 1881). The title is Abby Fisher's own. Her method is four lines long: "Half tablespoonful of lard to a pint of meal, one teacup of boiling water; stir well and bake on a hot griddle. Sift in meal one teaspoonful of soda." It is scalded cornmeal cooked on a griddle — the plainest bread in her book, and the one whose name carries its origin in the plantation South.

That naming is not incidental. Fisher was born in Orangeburg, South Carolina, in June 1831 to Abbie Clifton; genealogical research in San Francisco records identifies her father as James J. Andrews, an Orangeburg planter whose farm held some seventy people in slavery, and an 1869 receipt from the Freedman's Savings and Trust in Mobile records her under her mother's name. Before 1865, censuses recorded only an enslaver's name with the age and sex of those he held, so no surviving record names Fisher herself; Karen Hess, who rediscovered her book, noted that absence of documentation. Whatever the gaps in the paper record, this recipe is one a woman out of that world set down under her own name, in a book she could not read, dictated from "an experience of upwards of thirty-five years."

The historical record does not document a specific earlier origin for this particular preparation, and What stands is Fisher's own: a plantation bread named as such by a cook who knew it from the inside.

Ingredients

• 0.5 tablespoon lard
• 1 pint cornmeal
• 1 teacup boiling water
• 1 teaspoon baking soda

Instructions

1. Sift the baking soda into the cornmeal.
2. Add the lard and boiling water.
3. Stir well to combine.
4. Bake on a hot griddle.