Welcome to our very first menu of 2017! I’m proud to announce that our new Book of the Month will be Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books.
I love all the hearty frontier food featured in the books—smoked venison, corn cakes, snow candy, and so much more! One food that stuck out to me in the Little House books was “johnny cake.” I’d never heard of it before, but the Ingalls family eats it while traveling to their new homestead, so it sounded like perfect pioneer food.
As I researched johnny cake, I learned that there’s actually a lot of disagreement over what it actually IS, since the definition has changed over the years. Modern versions are basically fried corn cakes, but the original frontier version was a large “corn flatbread” baked in the oven. The latter description seems to fit the Little House books best, since when Ma makes johnny cake, it’s said to bake in a pan in the oven, not fry in a skillet on the stovetop. It’s also referred to in the singular, as if one johnny cake will feed the whole family.
To keep this johnny cake as authentic as possible, I actually used the recipe that appears in the official Little House Cookbook, which uses a lot of the recipes from Laura’s own family. It’s more flat and crumbly than traditional cornbread, but it’s a great, easy way to get a sense of how people ate back in Laura’s day.
Little House Johnny Cake
“Laura always wondered why bread made of corn meal was called johnny-cake. It wasn’t cake. Ma didn’t know, unless the Northern soldiers called it johnny-cake because the people in the South, where they fought, ate so much of it.”
— Little House in the Big Woods
INGREDIENTS:
- 2 cups cornmeal
- 1 tsp salt
- 1 tsp baking soda
- 2 tbsp bacon grease, melted
- 2 tbsp honey or molasses
- 1 cup buttermilk (To make your own, add 1 tbsp lemon juice to a measuring cup, pour in milk until it reaches the 1 cup mark, stir, and leave it to sit for 5 minutes. Now you’ve got buttermilk!)
Makes 1 pan of johnny cake (about 12 servings)
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INSTRUCTIONS:
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- Preheat your oven to 400°. Liberally grease a 9×13 baking pan.
- Whisk the cornmeal, salt, and baking soda together in a large bowl. Make a well in the middle. Stir the honey into 1/2 cup boiling water until smooth. Pour the honey water and bacon grease into the well. Stir it all up with a fork until fully combined (it will be lumpy and crumbly). Stir in the buttermilk until smooth.
- Pour the johnny cake batter into the baking sheet and place it in the oven. Allow it to bake for 15-20 minutes or until the edges are brown and the top shows several cracks.
- Slice it up and use a spatula to lift out the pieces.
- Serve warm with honey and butter on a cold winter’s night on the frontier.
Johnny cake is definitely much more utilitarian than the cornbread we eat today. It’s less sweet and more grainy, but topping it with butter and honey helps add more flavor. I love knowing that this is exactly the sort of thing the pioneers ate in the mid 1800s. Talk about bringing a book to life! 🙂
Wanting more cornbread? Check out our Missouri-Style Honey Bacon Cornbread!
There’s a Little House Cookbook!!? I had no idea!
It’s really cute! It has quotes from the books in front of the recipes, and there are even some explanations for how the food evolved over time.
I always wondered what Johnny Cake was too—Now I know!!
Nicole @ Feed Your Fiction Addiction
Lol! It’s definitely on the same list for me as hardtack: I’m glad I got to have the experience of making it…but it also makes me SO glad for modern luxuries like sugar and leaveners!
Oooo this sounds tasty!
storitorigrace.blogspot.com
Thanks! I’ll admit, I like regular cornbread better, but this was a fun experience.
Johnny cake is made with a sweetener of some kind.
There are lots of varieties of johnny cake (some with sweetener, some without). I chose this version since I believe it to be the closest to what Laura would have eaten, since this is the recipe featured in the Little House Cookbook.
Love your blog, I remember reading that johnny cake is a derivation from “journey cake” 🙂
Aww, thank you! 🙂 Isn’t it cool how words develop over time?
Your ingredients list calls for baking soda, but in the directions, it says baking powder …
All fixed! Thanks for letting me know.
I’m curious where Ma got buttermilk from when they were traveling by covered wagon, and when they lived on the prairie before they got the cow. How did she make cornbread without eggs or milk?
These are great questions! Johnny cake isn’t exactly cornbread. It’s a cornmeal flatbread, a precursor to what we know as cornbread, so it uses slightly different ingredients (hence the absence of eggs). As for the buttermilk, Ma likely still had some stored safely in the wagon after they sold the cow (it would have been a byproduct of any butter she’d recently made).