A couple years ago, on the last day of a trip to a garlic festival with friends in upstate New York, we stopped at a Goodwill (or maybe it was a Salvation Army) to see what treasures had been deposited there.
Okay, maybe most of what we found was junk, but what keeps me stopping at these places is the same thing that has me hooked on auctions. You never know what you’ll come across.
On this day, while looking through some books, I found one that I remembered from my childhood: “Johnny Cake, Ho!,” written by Ruth Sawyer and illustrated by Robert McCloskey in 1953. It’s the story of a little boy whose family sends him off with a journey cake (a flat bread made of cornmeal) to find another home after they lose their farm animals and can’t afford to feed three people.
He leaves with his few possessions and the large crusty journey cake at the top of a sack on his back. The journey cake falls out of the sack, he runs after it, and attracts an array of farm animals (hens, a cow, chicken, sheep, pigs), all focused on catching the bread and eating it. They all end up back at his farm, and the old woman warms up the journey cake but gives it a new name – Johnny Cake.
I thought about that book recently when I was watching an episode of Guy Fieri’s “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives” on the Food Network. He was visiting the Liberty Elm Diner in Providence, R.I., where one of the specialties is johnnycakes. Rhode Island is considered the home of this type of bread. Fieri stood by in the kitchen as the owner mixed stone-ground cornmeal, sugar, salt and hot water into a bowl. She smeared butter on the grill and cooked the concoction like pancakes. Once cooked, she served them to Fieri with maple syrup. As he always does (I wonder if he ever hates anything he eats!), Fieri fawned over them and her.
From where I come from in the South, these breads are called hoecakes. Depending on what you read, johnnycakes – which are also called journey cakes – originated with Native Americans, who taught the Pilgrims how to make them. Hoecakes are said to have been created by slaves who used hoes in the fields to cook the cornmeal. Here’s another version of how the hoecake got its name.
I cook hoecakes at home, but I’ve never eaten them for breakfast with syrup. In my Southern black family, hoecakes are a dinner food, served like corn bread. They are baked in a frying pan or cast-iron skillet, and are the size of that pan, not small like pancakes.
I make my hoecake (I only cook a small one, as seen in the photo above along with another of my favorites, yams) in much the same way as the diner’s owner, except that I mix reduced fat (and lactose-free) milk and onions with my white stone-ground corn meal. I cook it in olive oil. I’ve seen some recipes on the web for hoecakes – including this one by Food Network host Paula Deen, a Southerner – that make this simple recipe much too complicated.
It’s good without the cholesterol-laden eggs, whole milk, sugar, vegetable oil, and heaven forbid, bacon grease or lard.
The mother in the book made journeycakes pretty simply, singing her ingredients:
“Ho, for a Journey Cake –
Quick on a griddle bake!
Sugar and salt,
Turn it and brown it,
Johnny, come eat it with milk for your tea.”
I tried making johnnycakes using the same recipe the diner used from the book “The Joy of Cooking (which called them jonnycakes)”: white corn meal and hot water (I no longer add salt or sugar to my dishes). The recipe called for allowing it to sit for 10 minutes, which I did. I used olive oil in my skillet and poured in the batter. The johnnycakes did not brown in some spots, and they stuck to the skillet (my hoecakes never stick). I found them to be too messy. Maybe my substitutions were the problem. (Photo below is the johnnycakes I made.)
I ate the johnnycakes with syrup and turkey bacon, but, I’m sorry, Rhode Island, they’re no match for hoecakes.
