Betsy Challenge 10: Pumpkin Hoe Cakes

As with every single challenge, I started this one with very good intentions. The challenge was just in time for an immersion event I was doing; making cakes in an 1820s log cabin would be the thing to take my Historical Food Fortnightly participation to the next level!

Well, it didn't happen. I found a cabin-worthy cake, but was so busy having an excellent time (and slumming it as a tavern maid) that I didn't get a chance to make the cakes.

When I got home (after some adventures too tedious to mention here) I decided to make the things I'd been planning on making anyway - pumpkin hoe cakes, from the Kentucky Housewife. Hoe cakes are a kind of fried cornmeal cake indigenous to the southern United States. I picked this recipe because it was simple and fast. It was also dated to the time in which our cabin was first built and occupied, and a similar location (our cabin having come from Tennessee) and it was very appealing to cook the same food that might have been cooked in the cabin when it was first occupied. It was also very seasonal - 'tis the season for pumpkin, after all.


The Challenge: Let Them Eat Cake!

The Recipe: Pumpkin Hoe Cakes, from The Kentucky Housewife by Lettice Bryan

The Date/Region: 1835/Kentucky

How Did You Make It: The recipe calls for 1 quart of cornmeal, and 1 pint of pumpkin. You mix this together, with enough milk to make a thin dough, and fry it on a griddle greased with lard or butter until browned. Serve hot with butter.

I surprisingly know a thing or two about working with cornmeal, and one of the things I know is that corn has no gluten. Cooks in the 19th century often used cornmeal in exactly the same ways as they would use wheat flour, but  corn's lack of gluten makes cornmeal a very different creature.

When working with cornmeal, it is helpful to use hot (boiling) water and let it sit for about 20 minutes before working with it. This gives the best taste and makes the cornmeal more malleable (and less likely to crumble into bits, which was my big concern). So, despite there being no mention of this technique in the original recipe, I heated up the milk to scald it, mixed it in with the cornmeal until it was just moistened, and let it sit a spell.

After it sat, I mixed in the pumpkin. The texture was good, so I dropped it by very heaped tablespoons into the pan to fry. It took about 4 or 5 minutes on each side to fry up, and it was hard to tell when it was browned. A couple did fall apart, but most stuck together - victory!

Time to Complete: About a quarter of an hour from start to finish.

Total Cost: Under $5. I randomly have a superfluity of cornmeal, and a small can of pumpkin was less than $1

How Successful Was It: I was surprised at how much I liked them. They're good in the way that anything browned in butter, and then spread with more butter, is going to be good. They remind me a great deal of fried cornmeal mush (unsurprisingly) or cornmeal fritters. However, they are rather bland. I could see serving them with any mid-19th century condiment - apple butter, fruit preserves, honey, sorghum, molasses, maple syrup, or even spread with brown sugar. I ate them on the side of some carrot soup, which made for a very orange dinner, but they went together surprisingly well.

How Accurate Is It: Besides my liberties with the cornmeal and the milk, I used a can of pumpkin instead of stewing my own heirloom variety, and I am sure the corn is not heirloom either. Modern stove, etc etc etc.

They aren't very photogenic...

Betsy - Challenge 7: The Best Thing Since Sliced Bread

I got a little literal, and a little abstract with this one, guys. The first thing that popped into my head with "food revolutions" was Grahamism, so I decided to go with that, and take the "bread" part literally with Graham bread.

Grahamism was a food movement, promoted by Reverend Sylvester Graham (duh) in the early to mid-19th century. Rev. Graham was sort of the Dr. Atkins of his time. He promoted a strict vegetarian diet, healthy habits (including daily bathing and the daily brushing of teeth), and abstinence from alcohol. This, he believed, would cure lust - he also promoted sexual abstinence. I bet he was a lot of fun to be around. If you're dealing with insomnia, you might want to give his A Treatise on Bread, and Bread-Making a try. Despite this, his diet was immensely popular and his ideas influenced many of the leading nutritionists of the 19th century, including the Kellogg brothers.

One of the pillars of the Graham diet was a hearty, dense, whole wheat bread that came to be known as Graham bread. In the 19th century, flour was frequently adulterated with substances like chalk, and contained additives to make the bread appear whiter. Graham bread was made with "unbolted"(coarsely-ground whole wheat) flour, free of additives and adulterations. It should be noted that the healthy properties of such bread was well-known and recognized, especially for those suffering stomachaches - it was often called "dyspeptic bread". Graham didn't invent the bread, or Graham flour, but his promotion of the bread connected his name with it, as noted by Elizabeth Acton in Modern Cookery.

The hey-day of Grahamism was the 1840s and early 1850s. I wanted to make an 1860s recipe, rather than an earlier recipe, so I found this recipe for Graham bread from Practical American Cookery, edited by Elizabeth Hall:

So. "Make in the usual fashion", right?

The Challenge: The Best Thing Since Sliced Bread

The Recipe: Graham Bread, from Practical American Cookery

The Date/Year and Region: 1860, United States

How Did You Make It:  I looked up the recipe for wheat bread in the same volume, which called for four quarts of flour and a pint of yeast, and I knew I was in over my head. This might be a good time to once again note that I am no great chef, and I am even less great of a bread-baker. Working with yeast terrifies me. So I put out a call to the fine folks over in the Facebook group to see what their experience was, while I got to researching. Long story short: yes, their yeast was different from ours - it mostly came from breweries as a byproduct of beer-brewing, and there are some ways to reproduce it. There is much more to say about this, but I'm going to save it for another day (and another post) and just note that I decided that I, my apartment neighbors, and those taste-testing the bread would all just be happier if I saved yeast experiments for another time and place, and went with some active dry yeast.

Also, when is a quart not a quart? When Mrs. Hall says it is a pound. Lesson learned: check out the measurements guide in any 19th century cookbook, or you'll be very sad.

Despite all that, I emerged victorious. Using the aforementioned wheat bread recipe, I figured out the proportion of water and salt to flour. I took the Graham bread recipe and turned it into a ratio: two parts fine flour, two parts unbolted flour, and one part cornmeal. I did two cups of each flour, and one cup of the scalded cornmeal. I added the salt and the molasses, kneaded, let it rise, put in loaf pans, let it rest for an hour, then popped it into a 350 degree oven for about 35 minutes.

Time to Complete: From scalding the cornmeal to finishing the bread, it took about 3 hours, but that was mostly letting the dough rise and then rest. Probably about half an hour to 45 minutes of actual work.

Total Cost: Negligible. All-purpose flour and whole-wheat flour and cornmeal, all of which I had on hand, plus the yeast, salt and a dollop of molasses = basically nothing.

How Successful Was It?: It turned out pretty good! It was tasty - a little bland, but not bad. Scalding the cornmeal really helped, I think - it's definitely dense and chewy, but it doesn't have that gritty cornmeal texture. The Gentleman Friend (once again playing the part of guinea pig) declared it a success. I sent him home with half a loaf.

How Accurate Is It?: Well, there's the aforementioned yeast issue; I'd definitely like to try it again with a more accurately-replicated yeast to see what the difference is. I also made a judgement call on the unbolted flour - some recipe books called it "bran", but many of the recipes for Graham bread suggested sifting the flour first before using it, so I decided to use whole wheat flour. Again, I'd like to try it again and see what the taste difference is.

Have a picture!