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Dessert

Ash Cake

A cornmeal cake cooked by covering it with hot ashes, wrapped in cabbage leaves.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Ash Cake

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Scald the cornmeal with boiling water.

  2. Add the salt and shortening, mixing until cool enough to handle.

  3. Form the mixture into oblong cakes, adding more water if necessary.

  4. Wrap the cakes in cabbage leaves or place one leaf under and one over the cakes.

  5. Cover the wrapped cakes with hot ashes.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

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

Cornmeal
Forms the bulk of the cake; its starch swells with boiling water and binds into a shapeable dough.
Lard
Adds fat that tenderizes the dough and helps keep the cakes from drying out.

The step that matters

Scald the cornmeal with boiling water. Boiling water gelatinizes the starch in cornmeal, which lets the grains bind together. Too little water leaves the mixture crumbly and hard to shape into cakes.

“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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