Making corn pone

[Terry Sorchy]

Re: Making corn pone

Hank,
I will get the name of the reicipe book. It was from the 1850's. It's at Nancys house.
You are right the baking soda was called something else. That is a slight modification of vernacular of essentially the same thing.
Cheers
Terry Sorchy

[Hank Trent]

Re: Making corn pone

Hank,
I will get the name of the reicipe book. It was from the 1850's. It's at Nancys house.
You are right the baking soda was called something else. That is a slight modification of vernacular of essentially the same thing.
Cheers
Terry Sorchy

Thank you! If it's 1850's, I'm even more interested. :)

Baking powder was a change from the pearlash/saleratus/soda continuum, because it included both the acid and the alkali in the same ingredient. The problem was keeping them from reacting to each other in the container, before they were put in the food. What's unique about that corn biscuit recipe is that it's designed only for baking powder--there's no milk or molasses or other acid like cream of tartar to react with an alkali like soda, and no other rising ingredient like yeast or beaten eggs to help.

It's unusual to find published recipes in normal recipe books which were designed for baking powder that early, though obviously someone was buying and using the baking powder that was being sold.

I think a lot of the early published recipes were put out by the baking powder companies to encourage use of their products, and thus specify "Reed's Baking Powder" or "Berwick's Baking Powder," etc., so it's also interesting to find recipes which call for it with no brand name.

Edited to add: Here's a good example, from the May 28, 1861 Savannah Republican newspaper:

Biscuit.

To a quart of flour, add a bit of butter, lard, or skimmings from a pot where salt beef has been boiled, as large as a butternut; if the fat is not salt, add a little; rub these well together, and add as much of Durkee's baking powder as the directions on that article order for the quantity of flour used; wet this to a dough, and make into cakes of the usual size; put on a tin pan and place it before the fire, with a few coals underneath; slant the pan, in order to get the reflection of the fire. But if you have no wheat flour, then make

Hoe-Cake.

Mix Indian meal with hot or cold water (hot is best), and a little salt, into a soft dough; spread it very thin on the surface of a board, slant it before the fire, and bake it to a light brown. With this rule, if you want variety, mix an egg, or a little flour and baking powder, with a bit of fat rubbed into the meal; in these cases it must be baked in a pan.

It's a reprint from the New York Tribune, with the heading, "I send you here a few hints as to camping out, from a lady who has an experimental knowledge of such matters." You can see how she's gradually assimilating the use of baking powder as a generic ingredient into her cooking, by still relying on Durkee's brand-name instructions in one recipe, while speaking of it generically in another.


Hank Trent
hanktrent@voyager.net

[cap tassel]

Re: Making corn pone

Just to say for reference, the above quote from Wiki, but it makes the major difference when it comes to cornbread vs. cornpone- Cornpone is fried in grease (bacon, butter, etc.), while cornbread is baked in an oven.

Where did these definitions come from? True pone can be made in the oven too.

[Hank Trent]

Re: Making corn pone

Where did these definitions come from? True pone can be made in the oven too.

What he said. I don't think there's any single definition for ingredients or preparation, or if there was, it varied from region to region. But baking, in a shallow covered skillet rather than a bake kettle, is probably the easiest to document.

The 1860 Dictionary of Americanisms specified baking: "Corn Pone. A superior kind of corn-bread, made with milk and eggs and baked in a pan."

Social Relations in Our Southern States by Daniel Robinson Hundley, also 1860, allows for baking, but no ingredients except cornmeal, salt and water:

Corn-dodger, corn-pone, and hoe-cake are different only in the baking. The meal is prepared for each precisely in the same way. Take as much meal as you want, some salt, and enough pure water to knead the mass. Mix it well, let it stand some fifteen or twenty minutes, not longer, as this will be long enough to saturate perfectly every particle of meal; bake on the griddle for hoe-cake, and in the skillet or oven for dodger or pone. The griddle or oven must be made hot enough to bake, but not to burn, but with a quick heat. The lid must be heated also before putting it on the skillet or oven, and that heat must be kept up with coals of fire placed on it, as there must be around and under the oven. The griddle must be well supplied with live coals under it. The hoe-cake must be
put on thin, not more than or quite as thick as your forefinger; when brown, it must be turned and both sides baked to a rich brown color. There must be no burning—baking is the idea. Yet the baking must be done with a quick lively heat, the quicker the better. Saleratus and soda, procul, O procul! Let there be nothing but water and salt.

Arthur's Home Magazine, 1853, published a recipe with more ingredients:

A correspondent of the Ohio Cultivator, gives the following recipe:--In reply to Lizzie's inquiry, I would suggest the following mode of making Corn Pone or Johnny Cake: To one pint of sour buttermilk add three eggs, one tea-spoonful of saleratus, one quarterp ound of butter, thicken with fine fine meal, do not make it too stiff, spread on a buttered pan and bake quickly.

Hank Trent
hanktrent@voyager.net

[GASharpshooter]

Re: Making corn pone

I've always heard corn pone is made without milk and eggs and not much else but water. Baked or fried.

[Terry Sorchy]

Re: Making corn pone

One thing we must remember folks. Recipes then like now were passed on much of the time from generation to generation by word of mouth. Each generation changed this and that to make it to their tastes. Not every woman stood there with a cookbook to look at a recipe and not all women followed the exact recipes. Did I read this assumption from an account, no. I used something they had much more of back then "common sense" and I used accounts from my mother and her mother and her mothers mother. When I asked my mom for her recipes when I was old enough to cook she told me that she had it all in her head.
Trouble is today we can over complicate the simple.:wink_smil
Cheers:D
Terry Sorchy

[Hank Trent]

Re: Making corn pone

One thing we must remember folks. Recipes then like now were passed on much of the time from generation to generation by word of mouth. Each generation changed this and that to make it to their tastes. Not every woman stood there with a cookbook to look at a recipe and not all women followed the exact recipes. Did I read this assumption from an account, no. I used something they had much more of back then "common sense" and I used accounts from my mother and her mother and her mothers mother. When I asked my mom for her recipes when I was old enough to cook she told me that she had it all in her head.
Trouble is today we can over complicate the simple.:wink_smil
Cheers:D
Terry Sorchy

Um, I guess you're saying the recipe I inquired about wasn't actually published in the 1850s? Or you haven't had a chance to look it up yet, and the above post is in reference to something else? I'm not sure.

If it's an oral-history recipe and therefore could possibly be from a later period, I'd say it's very typical of the late 19th century, when baking powder was common. Each generation did change things, and the addition of baking powder in foods that formerly didn't have them was a common trend in the late 19th century. If it's actually firmly dated to the 1850s, then it's an early example of someone incorporating something new.

If you're just talking in general... I'll play devil's advocate and speak up for the value of studying historic foodways. :D

It's a detailed and complex field like anything else, though a lot of reenactors don't find it as interesting as, say, uniforms or tactics. Studying published and hand-written recipes, food product advertisements and sales, diaries, narrative accounts, and testing period recipes until you can make them without measuring, may seem like over complicating things, but in my opinion, it's no more so than looking at quartermaster returns, original uniforms, CDVs and contract specifications, when all one really needs to look like a Confederate soldier, is a gray uniform homemade by one's mother or wife, right? :)

This is why I was hesitant to ask for more information, and wouldn't have done so except that this was the AC forum where discussing the finer points of period life is hopefully acceptable, without causing offense.

Hank Trent
hanktrent@voyager.net

[cap tassel]

Re: Making corn pone

I've always heard corn pone is made without milk and eggs and not much else but water. Baked or fried.

Original pone was. By original I mean the natives' pone. A real early description of pone was written in 1612 by William Strachey in, Historie of Travell into Virginia Britania. He said the natives, "receave the flower in a platter of wood, which, blending with water, they make into flatt, broad cakes...and these they call apones, which covering with ashes till they be baked...and then washing them in faire water, lett dry with their own heate."

Apone literally meant baked. The natives would dip them in acorn oil or bear fat when they ate them.

The colonists adopted the pone as is, basically, and gradually turned it into all the variations we know, and into corn bread. In my mind I distinguish pone from bread by the introduction of leavening agent making it a bread. But I think a purist would say that true pone should only be made with only water.

[Vuhginyuh]

...rye is grown extensively in the south.

How extensive the crop was here is a matter for debate...however, in the areas of North Carolina where tobacco was not profitable or easy to barn, rye was grown by 75% of land owners with at least 200 acres of improved land. It's my understanding that rye was still predominantly an ethnic taste at the time we are interested in. The area of the state where it was a popular winter crop was home to many folks of German and northern European decent. The records do not break regional rye production down as a cereal or manure crop. (US Census, North Carolina 1860)

I can say with reasonable confidence that it was not a common ingredient in poor white recipes in the coastal plain (where the median temperature was too high for profitable germination).

_______________________________

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Tidelands Subsurface Imaging & Survey
Tidelands@ec.rr.com
Wilmington, N.C..

Barbecue, barbecue; ham an' turkey! Possum an' taters; chicken stew! Hustle, boys, hustle!

[Hank Trent]

Re: Making corn pone

How extensive the crop was here is a matter for debate...however, in the areas of North Carolina where tobacco was not profitable or easy to barn, rye was grown by 75% of land owner with at least 200 acres of improved land. It's my understanding that rye was still predominantly an ethnic taste at the time we are interested in. The area of the state where it was a popular winter crop was home to many folks of German and northern European decent.

(US Census, North Carolina 1860)

Either "rye and injun" (rye and corn) or thirded bread (rye, wheat and corn) seems to show up both north and south, though was especially symbolic of the old-time Yankee housewife. Like you, I get the impression that from many people's viewpoint, rye was used to extend the grain of choice (wheat or corn), rather than to deliberately enhance the flavor. Especially in the north, even the corn was seen as a less-desirable substitute for wheat, and "rye and injun" had a reputation as a food for poor or frugal folks. Though a lot of people had a fondness for breads including rye in a nostalgic way because that was what "mother used to make" before prosperity came and the hardscrabble pioneer era ended.

In the poem "A Fable for Critics," James Russell Lowell personified the classic old-fashioned Massachusetts "dear, notable goodwife" darning a stocking while thinking "Whether flour'll be so dear, for, as sure as she's living, She will use rye-and-injun then..."

Hank Trent
hanktrent@voyager.net

[Virginia Mescher]

Re: Making corn pone

I've been reading this thread with interest and thought I would add a few comments. The term "corn pone" almost seems to be generic. It is used to name almost any type of corn bread that is baked or fried, plain or fancy.

Some sources will be quite specific as to what a "pone" is but it will differ according according to the source. In the Great Western Cookbook by A. M. Collins (1857), http://digital.lib.msu.edu/projects/...stern/grea.pdf she is adamant about what a "pone" is. Other authors have recipes for corn pone which are quite different but go by the same name.

When it comes to corn pone and similar dishes there were many ways to cook them. Eliza Leslie published Indian Meal Book in 1846 which had numerous recipes for corn pone types of items ranging from the simple with cornmeal and water to those that added eggs,flour, salaratus, soda, yeast, yeast powder [baking powder], molasses, milk, grease, wine, spices, or lemon, and that didn't include other corn meal dishes in the book.

If you search Google Books ( my search was between 1830 and 1865), there are a number of references to various ways to prepare corn pone according to the region and preferences. As examples, the following was taken from the Dictionary of Americanisms, 1860. "CORN PONE. A superior kind of corn-bread, made with milk and eggs and baked in a pan." This is from Arthur's Magazine March 1853
CORN CAKE OR PONE. — . . . following mode of making Corn Pone Johnny Cake: To one pint of sour buttermilk ; add three eggs, one tea-spoon of saleratus as if wet with sour milk, one quarter pound of butter, thicken with fine fine meal, do not make it too stiff, spread on buttered pan and bake quickly." Looking in several handwritten cookbooks that I have or have copies of, the recipes differed.

It seems as if there is no one way to make corn pone and by reading period recipes one might wish to try different ones and choose one that is appropriate to their tastes.

If soldiers were cooking the corn pone on their own, I would expect that they may have prepared it as they had seen their mother prepare them, IF they had the ingredients. If the proper ingredients were missing I would expect that they would have used what they had. I have not had a chance to look through my military cookbooks to see if there were set recipes for making corn cakes.

[Vuhginyuh]

...rye is grown extensively in the south.

...rye... seems to show up both north and south...

This raises an interesting question about the crop. I never doubted the use of rye grass as a cereal grain on 19th century American tables, I was just curious about the ‘extensiveness’ of the crop growth in the south. That term tends to make rye sound like a staple crop. In an attempt to satisfy my curiosity I looked through several on-hand sources and I was surprised to find that it was grown on at least 85 large (200+ acres) farms in the western part of North Carolina. I just spoke to Drs.Chris Fonvielle and Alan Watson at UNC-W and they were as surprised as I was to hear about it.

I can only assume that it was a cereal crop. I understand that rye as forage for cattle wasn't a good thing at one time, it upset their stomachs and made the milk fat taste funny. There is a hybrid now that is strictly a forage rye for cattle and sheep.

And perhaps distillers along the Monongahela were buying it.

[Hank Trent]

Re: Making corn pone

Here's a summary of the amount of rye grown in each state in 1860 and 1850:

http://books.google.com/books?id=7u9uuLnSKXwC&pg=PT13

The subsequent pages discuss it a bit more. Unfortunately, they don't break it down into what it was used for (distilling, flour, etc.) or even how much was exported vs. used domestically, though I think nationwide export figures are elsewhere in the book.

DeBow's Review at http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text...image;seq=0401 says "During the year ending June 1, 1850, there were consumed of rye, about 2,144,000 bushels in the manufacture of malt and spiritous liquors." According to census returns, the author says the total product of the country was 14,188,637 in 1850, and in 1850-51, 44,152 barrels were exported.

Hank Trent
hanktrent@voyager.net

[Terry Sorchy]

Re: Making corn pone

Graham Flour was the staple baking Flour of the time. Wheat and Rye and Corn Flour were much coarser. Bleached Flour did not come about until 1869.
Terry Sorchy

[Vuhginyuh]

Thats a lot of rye

That may substantiate my Monongahela theory.