Hoe Cake?

Bread

This was a major staple of my mother's cooking when I was a girl. But before anyone argues with me about what a "hoe cake" is, let me explain. Years ago, the idea started that hoe cakes came about from field hands creating a cornbread pancake and cooking it on their hoes. As someone who grew up farming and using a hoe, I'm here to tell you just how odd and icky that idea is. Never mind the fact that it's extremely unhygienic (if you've used a hoe, you know you can't really get it clean again and would never want to eat off it), they're really not big enough to cook on and the metal that they're made from isn't heat conductive enough to make a good cooking tool. Plus, they way they're usually angled would mean you'd have to hold them down so that the wood handles would catch fire and destroy them.

There's a thousand reasons why this idea makes no sense and rates up there with the doctoral candidate who pitched the concept that FU came from the archers who'd had a middle finger cut off after battle and then shouted "pluck yew!" at their enemies. Again, as an archer whose draw weight is about half of the 100# bow they used, I can promise you no English bowman was pulling one hundred pounds on a single string and holding it with one single finger (you can't even properly hold an arrow if you only use one finger). It takes three to four fingers or a device to pull back and hold a bowstring on an English D-Curve longbow. And since you can use more than one finger and most archers do, those lopping off a single middle finger wouldn't take the time to isolate and take that one digit when they could just lop off the entire hand and definitely end the archer's career forever. So, soap box issues aside.

The term "hoe"was an old southern term that was also applied to iron skillets. So "hoe cake" meant a cake that was baked or made in an iron skillet. Not to be confused with "pone" bread. Pone bread is cornbread for those who've never heard the term. And it's the only term my grandmother ever used for it. I didn't hear cornbread used for cornbread until I was grown.

Where I grew up in rural Georgia, hoe cake or hoecake was always made with flour and no cornbread at all. What others call "hoecake" --those fried cornbread pancakes, my grandmother and mother used to call "Johnny Cakes." I have no idea why. I've heard a lot of explanations and the one I like best is that it's a corruption of "journey cakes" because cornbread travels easy and you can carry it in your saddle bags and fry it up in a pan on the road, which makes sense.

Whatever you want to call them, hoecakes (hoe cakes) and johnny cakes are yummy! They, along with pone bread and/or biscuits were always present at every meal, along with homemade strawberry preserves, homemade butter and clotted cream. This is my family recipe for our "hoe cake" and I'll post my mom's johnny cake recipe next.

Granny Mae Wisdom--Never do anything you don't want to have to explain to paramedics.

Instead of sugar, you can also sprinkle with onion salt or powder or garlic salt. And if you really want to make it nummy, drizzle pecan sauce over it!