Hoe cakes or cornbread? A dinner discussion among friends

Enjoying Christmas brunch with family and extended family this past week was fun and entertaining.

My sister, her husband and I put together a decent sized meal for six, although it was not nearly as much food as my grandmother would have prepared – even for a regular Sunday dinner.

We had ham, grits, fruit salad, cucumber and onion salad, a potato and cheese casserole, homemade sausages (plain and onion), scrambled eggs, liver pudding (a yuck, for me), and handmade biscuits (plain and cheesy).

The dessert table included gingerbread men (some decorated curiously like Cyclops), sands, chocolate cake, and a vasilopita (a lemon-scented, almond-topped cake). I probably missed something, there was a bit much.

When gathered around the table, dinner conversation took a turn from my brother-in-law’s biscuits to a friend of my dad’s reminiscing about how he grew up in rural Alabama some 60-plus years ago.

Big John and my dad go way back. They met when my dad was enrolled at the University of South Carolina and working at a gas stationand John, a couple of years younger, would pull in to the pumps before going out on his delivery route for the Columbia Record newspaper.

Since 1958, they have worked together off and on and John, good naturedly enough, has taken the brunt of my dad’s practical jokes.

John’s wife was visiting an out-of-town daughter, so he was brought to our table and now there he was, seated across from me at the dining room table and telling us all about his upbringing.

His grandfather was a sharecropper. His grandmother would get up around 3 or 4 in the morning to prepare breakfast and lunch, usually a piece of meat, coffee, buttermilk, and some sort of bread –biscuits or cornbread or hoe cakes.

Breakfast was bigger, to give you energy. The leftover meat and bread would get wrapped up and taken to the fields for lunch, with water to drink.

After commenting on my brother-in-law’s biscuits, Big John and my dad got into a discussion about cornbread vs. hoe cakes.

First, the two are made similarly, with cornbread using some sort of fat (lard, Crisco or butter), milk or buttermilk, and eggs mixed with cornmeal, while hoe cakes are simply cornmeal, salt and water.

Cornbread is baked, preferably in a cast iron skillet. The skillet will have a thin layer of bacon grease that has been heated to the smoking point and the batter will sizzle when it gets poured, carefully and gently, into the pan.

Hoe cakes are fried in the oil of your choice (lard, bacon grease, butter or something not as heavy such as vegetable or peanut oil), again, in a cast iron skillet. The cakes can be as big or as small as you prefer (Big John’s grandmother could make one the size of the pan), but are often about 3-4 inches wide and resemble a pancake.

Over the years, flour has crept into hoe cake recipes. My grandmother would mix up a batch of biscuits (flour, Crisco and milk) and, rather than bake them, form flat discs with her hands and fry those up as you would a hoe cake. But, the two are very different.

A hoe cake is a hoe cake and should be savored for the simple flavor of stone ground corn. And you should use the best cornmeal you can find.

If the recipe calls for flour or, heaven forbid, sugar, then what you have there is, well....

Combine corn meal and boiling water in a bowl and stir to blend.

In a cast iron skillet, heat ¼ inch of oil over medium low heat until a drop of water sizzles when dropped in.

Spoon batter, by the tablespoon, into hot skillet and fry until golden brown. Turn and fry other side until golden brown. Remove from pan and onto a plate with a paper towel, to absorb extra oil. Serve with butter, syrup or potlikker.

Heat oven to 450 degrees. Place a 10-inch cast iron skillet in oven.

In a bowl, combine cornmeal, salt, baking soda and baking powder

Combine 4 tablespoons of lard, the egg and buttermilk. Stir wet ingredients into the dry until smooth.

Move the skillet from the oven to the stove top, over high heat. Add the remaining lard to the pan and swirl to coat. Pour in the batter, it should sizzle vigorously.

Shake the skillet to evenly distribute the batter. Cook 15 to 18 minutes, or until a tester inserted into the center comes out clean.

*Crisco is a good substitute, bacon grease will do in a pinch

Sean Brock, Husk

This story was originally published December 29, 2015 at 7:32 PM with the headline "Hoe cakes or cornbread? A dinner discussion among friends."