Hoe-cake No. 2
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the dough
Use coarse water‑ground white meal for these cakes, if possible.
Add a teaspoonful of salt to a quart of meal.
Pour enough boiling water over the mixture to make a soft dough.
Add a little milk to improve browning.
Let the dough stand for an hour or longer, then knead it by hand.
Bake and serve
Shape the dough into small cakes about an inch thick, and bake on a greased griddle until browned on both sides.
Serve the cakes very hot.
Split the cakes and spread with butter when eaten.
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. See the original page.
Explore the science
What each ingredient does
- Meal
- Forms the body of the cakes; its starch swells with hot water to set a soft dough.
- Milk (in the method)
- Its milk sugars and proteins brown on the griddle, giving the cakes a golden surface.
- Butter (in the method)
- Adds richness and fat at serving, softening the cake and carrying flavor.
The step that matters
Pouring the boiling water into the meal. Coarse meal absorbs hot water unevenly, so the starch must swell fully. Too little water leaves the dough crumbly and too much makes it slack 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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