The word Moravian can simply refer to someone from Moravia, now a small province of the Czech Republic on the border with Poland. More often, though, it refers to members of a Protestant Christian religious sect that arose in that part of the world in the 1400’s. The Moravians’ disputes with the Roman church predated […]
READ ONOh you never would believe where those hermit cookies come from… They’re made mostly by New Englanders these days. That is, the people of Vermont, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine…New Hampshire, and, oh…come on now…uh…Rhode Island! That’s it. As a flatlander, I always had trouble with those little states on grade school geography tests. Things clearly aren’t […]
READ ONHow could I be? But then I should probably talk about cookies at least a little. The funny thing is, a lot of what I’ve been saying about corn cakes also applies to cookies…except of course the part about Europeans not caring for them. As anyone who’s been to Europe can attest, there’s nothing that […]
READ ONSo what is it specifically that kept Indian corn cakes from rising? In a word: gluten. Corn meal simply hasn’t got any. As you may recall from previous posts on the subject, gluten is a substance that’s unique to wheat. It’s made up two proteins, gliadin and glutenin, which all by themselves are some of […]
READ ONOne conspicuous bit of corn bread errata that can be found in a surprising number of reputable reference books is the contention that “hoe cakes” were actually baked on hoes. Nonsense. The Indians baked corn cakes on hot rocks, either placed over, or very close to, open fires. They didn’t need a metal hoe to […]
READ ONFor more than a few Southerners, the johnnycake is the ultimate example of the Confederate corn bread arts, it being a small, highly portable, highly palatable cake perfect for stowing in a military knapsack. True as that description may be, the johnnycake is in fact a far older invention. The cake goes back to Colonial […]
READ ONOne of the reasons I think it’s interesting to be making cookies and corn bread (or cakes) the same week is that they’re both proto-breads of different cultures, one for whom wheat was the most readily available grain, and another that relied on corn. Put early Eurasian peoples next to pre-colonial Native Americans, and they […]
READ ONThe reaction of colonists to Indian corn cakes is probably fairly well represented in the 1972 Robert Redford film, Jeremiah Johnson. In it our hero is forced, out of an accident of Flathead Indian etiquette, to take the tribal chief’s daughter as his wife. In their ensuing attempt to set up housekeeping, the girl collects […]
READ ONOne of my favorite memories from the block where I grew up concerns a Swedish couple that lived a few houses down. The woman of the house, a classic round-faced Nordic matron by the name of Lily, was the most accomplished baker in town. My sister and I would sneak in her back door on […]
READ ONWhen most scholars consider the year 1492, they see the collision of two great groups of peoples, of hunter-gatherer society and the Age of Exploration, of anthropomorphic spirit worship with Christianity, of “natural” man with the principles of parliamentary politics, accumulated capital and property rights. All wrong. Seen in the proper context, what 1492 really […]
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