Tuesday, November 07, 2006
The Lost Hoe Cake Recipe
We've got an old copy of The Joy of Cooking that also serves as a filing cabinet for all the loose recipes accumulated from friends, family, and internet downloads. While flipping through it looking for something I happened upon my dad's recipe for Virginia hoe cake, which he had sent to me more than ten years ago. Back in the summer I wrote about one of the essential components of my father's Sunday breakfast, herring roe. Hoe cake was another, and it was so good it would sometimes appear at other meals in the form of batter bread, often accompanying Thanksgiving leftovers.
I hadn't had hoe cake since my dad died so I procured the proper kind of cornmeal and followed the recipe, and the hoe cakes came out great. I ate mine split with butter and maple syrup, and took great pleasure in serving them to my boys who looked at them skeptically and said "what is it?" but then devoured one each.
For those interested, I reproduce my father's letter verbatim. In this case the recipes for both hoe cake and batterbread are intertwined. Give it (them) a try if you're so inclined, but just make sure you read the whole thing first, as it is not always linear. The last paragraph is my favorite, as my father discusses his own preferences for how batterbread should be eaten.
I hadn't had hoe cake since my dad died so I procured the proper kind of cornmeal and followed the recipe, and the hoe cakes came out great. I ate mine split with butter and maple syrup, and took great pleasure in serving them to my boys who looked at them skeptically and said "what is it?" but then devoured one each.
For those interested, I reproduce my father's letter verbatim. In this case the recipes for both hoe cake and batterbread are intertwined. Give it (them) a try if you're so inclined, but just make sure you read the whole thing first, as it is not always linear. The last paragraph is my favorite, as my father discusses his own preferences for how batterbread should be eaten.
For batterbread, you need to pre-heat a skillet or baking dish at 375-400 degrees while preparing the batter. It then takes about 40 minutes to bake, more if a large amount is made in a fairly deep container, less if a smaller amount is made or if baked in a more shallow pan. For either recipe you need to have some boiling water available when you start making batter.
Batter amounts also can vary. The quantity I propose here seems appropriate for two people with some left over or maybe enough for 3 people who eat with reasonable restraint.
2 cups white stone-ground cornmeal, some salt (up to half a teaspoon probably ok, but you may want less), and a pinch of baking soda (I sometimes omit it). Gradually stir in some boiling water, which partially cooks the meal, until you have a thick past.
At this point the recipes diverge. You are going to want to beat or blend together about 3/4 cup of milk and 2 eggs and add these to the batter. If you are making HOE CAKES, you want to still have a pretty thick paste even after this is added. For BATTERBREAD, however, you want the batter runny enough to pour into a skillet, so you may want to use more boiling water and have it a bit looser at the earlier stage. Also, to really do the batterbread right, you should separate the eggs, beating the whites until stiff. Combine the milk with the yolks and stir into the batter. After everything is thoroughly mixed, stir in the beaten whites. This gives the batter a lighter and fluffier quality when baked.
If making HOE CAKES with the thick pasty batter, just spoon several gobs of it into a hot greased skillet or onto a hot greased griddle and fry/grill like pancakes, adjusting the heat as needed to give you the shade of brown you want (not always easy). For BATTERBREAD, remove the pre-heated skillet or baking dish and grease thoroughly (I spray with PAM, which is easiest and possibly healthiest). Pour in the batter and bake at a high temperature (around 475) for about 40 minutes. Underdone batterbread will have too soft insides and will likely stick to the pan. Done right, it will have thick enough crust and should fall out of the pan without sticking when the pan is turned over onto a plate. Overdone, it will get too dark and crusty and lose much of its taste.
There are innumberable variants to the recipe. A.D. uses buttermilk instead of regular milk (and I think uses more milk and less water in preparing the batter). I try to augment the fibre and other nutrients by adding one package of regular instant oatmeal and 2-3 tablespoons of wheat germ, both of which we always have in the house for other uses. One can always add some grits to the batter (I grew up in a household that often had grits and usually had grits left over in the fridge; you did not!)
Some people like batterbread as a starch with meat and vegetables for dinner. I prefer it for breakfast, sometimes with egg or sausage or turkey hash, but especially with honey or syrup on it as with pancakes. I would NEVER make it sweet like waffles or muffins or serve with fruit or whipped cream as some people seem to do with those, but I bet that somewhere, somebody has committed such atrocities.
3 Comments:
By 
Cassandra, at
Tue Nov 07, 09:45:00 AM:
Oh how funny. We still make hoe cake every now and then. This was a staple during our poorer days when the boys were little. They used to love 'breakfast for dinner', which they thought was a treat but usually meant we'd once again run out of money before payday!
By 
, at
Tue Nov 07, 02:35:00 PM:
Hoe cake is a new one on me but we had a recipie for something called JIFFY CAKE
By , at
Fri Nov 17, 10:15:00 PM:
That's it! I have been looking everywhere for a recipe that might resemble the kind of cornbread made by the old ladies in East Texas, that I remember as a kid. The Batter Bread recipe should come very close. Thanks!
Margaret
Fort Worth
