Name: Ash Cake
Ingredients: 2 cups cornmeal; 1 cup water

Ash Cake

Ingredients

2 cups cornmeal
1 cup water

Directions

Make the dough

In a bowl, mix the cornmeal and water to form a stiff dough.
Shape the dough into a round cake about 1 inch thick.

Bake

Create a hot spot in the ashes of a fire and place the cake on the hot ashes.
Bake until the cake is cooked through.

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 main structure of the cake once mixed with water and baked.
Water: Hydrates the cornmeal so it binds into a stiff, shapeable dough.

“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.