Southern Corn Cakes
Ingredients
Directions
Combine cornmeal, salt, and lard in a bowl.
Pour enough hot water over the mixture to create a thick batter.
Heat a skillet and fry the batter like pancakes until golden brown.
Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.
Explore the science
What each ingredient does
- Corn meal
- Forms the main body of the cake, setting into a firm, grainy texture when fried.
- Lard
- Adds fat that helps the cakes brown in the pan and gives a richer flavor.
- Hot water
- Hydrates the cornmeal so it swells and binds into a workable batter.
The step that matters
Adding the hot water. Hot water hydrates the starch in the cornmeal more fully than cold water, so the batter thickens and holds together. Too little water leaves the cakes crumbly, while too much makes them slack and hard to flip.
“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.
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