Recipe: American Johnnycakes

Ingredients

• 2 slices of bacon
• olive oil
• 1 cup cornmeal
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp sugar
• 1 1/2 cups of boiling water
• 2 tbsp of the bacon fat

Instructions

Step 1

Transcript: How to Make Johnnycakes
Hi, I'm Chef John Mitzewich for About.com. Today we're making something called Johnnycakes. And Johnnycakes were America's first pancake. This cornmeal pancake only has a couple ingredients, and was taught to the early settlers by the Indians, and we're going to stick as close to the original recipe as we can.

Step 2

Prepare the Bacon
So we're going to start with 2 slices of bacon, diced up, in a medium hot pan. We're going to render it, meaning cook out the fat. We're going to save the crisp bacon and the fat, so once it's done get it out of the pan and reserve it.

Step 3

Johnnycake Ingredients
The batter, the mixture is very simple:

* 1 cup cornmeal
* 1 tsp salt
* 1 tsp sugar

You want to get your whisk ready. We're going to take some boiling water and pour it in here, whisk in 1 1/2 cups of boiling water - and that's the entire recipe.

Step 4

Johnnycake Origins
This is from the days before baking powder, baking soda. There's no egg - there's no milk. At times all they had was cornmeal and water - and luckily there was some bacon and maple syrup around. This is a real, true American heirloom recipe handed down for hundreds of years. And this tastes good too - so we're not going to just make this for historical purposes, we're going to make it because it tastes good.

Step 5

Fry the Johnnycakes
We're going to take a pan on med-high heat and add about 2 tbsp of the bacon fat. Then put 2-3 tbsps of the batter into the hot oil, and it's going to fry for about 5 minutes per side. What you want is a nice crispy golden brown exterior, and it's still going to be fairly tender inside.

Step 6

Naming Johnnycakes
Now, these are not leavened, meaning there's no baking powder to make these rise, or egg whites, or anything like that like the modern pancake. So, these are much more dense and substantial. These were meant to sustain people on long journeys, in fact another name for them is Journey Cakes, and that's where some believe the name came from.

Step 7

Serving Johnnycakes
So, there it is - after 5 minutes per side we're going to have these beautiful golden brown johnnycakes. And then the best part. How we're going to serve these is kind of traditional - these would have been served with maple syrup, or honey, or fruit preserves - so we're going to do that, but we're also going to top it with the diced bacon. It was very common to cook these in bacon drippings if butter wasn't available. So, we're going to garnish with the bacon pieces and drizzle on some maple syrup.

Now, get the real stuff, don't use fake maple syrup for this! It's an insult to our early settlers. And there you go, that is the johnnycake recipe, also known as journey cakes. Some people think this comes from the Indian Shawnee cake, which was a similar recipe. Regardless, give this a try. It's fun to eat something that people were eating 300 years ago pretty much exactly the same. I hope you give it a try. Enjoy.