Mix half a teaspoonful of salt with a cup of corn meal, and add to it boiling hot water until the swollen meal may be worked by one's hand into a ball, bury the ball in a nice bed of hot ashes (glowing embers) and leave it there to bake like a potato. Equalling the ash cake in fame and simplicity is
Pone
Pone is made by mixing the meal as described for the ash cake, but molding the mixture in the form of a cone and baking it in an oven.
Johnny-cake
Is mixed in the same way as the pone or ash cake, but it is not cooked the same, nor is it the same shape; it is more in the form of a very thick pancake. Pat the Johnny-cake into the form of a disk an inch thick and four inches in diameter. Have the frying pan plentifully supplied with hot grease and drop the Johnny-cake carefully in the sizzling grease. When the cake is well browned on one side turn it and brown it on the other side. If cooked properly it should be a rich dark brown color and with a crisp crust. Before it is eaten it may be cut open and buttered like a biscuit, or eaten with maple syrup like a hot buckwheat cake. This is the Johnny-cake of my youth, the famous Johnny-cake of Kentucky fifty years ago. Up North I find that any old thing made of corn meal is called a Johnny-cake and that they also call ash-cakes "hoe-cakes," and corn bread "bannocks," at least they call camp corn bread, a bannock. Now since bannocks were known before corn was known, suppose we call it
Camp Corn Bread and Corn Dodgers
In the North they also call this camp corn bread "Johnny-cake," but whatever it is called it is wholesome and nourishing. Take some corn meal and wheat flour and mix them fifty-fifty; in other words, a half pint each; add a teaspoon level full and a teaspoon heaping full of baking powder and about half a teaspoonful of salt; mix these all together, while dry, in your pan, then add the water gradually. If you have any milk go fifty-fifty with the water and milk, make the flour as thin as batter, pour it into a reflector pan, or frying pan, prop it up in front of a quick fire; it will be heavy if allowed to cook slowly at the start, but after your cake has risen you may take more time with the cooking. This is a fine corn bread to stick to the ribs. I have eaten it every day for a month at a time and it certainly has the food power in it. When made in form of biscuits it is called "corn dodgers."
Camp Biscuit
Take two cups full of flour and one level teaspoonful and one heaping teaspoonful of baking powder and half a teaspoonful of salt, and mix them together thoroughly while dry. To this you add milk and water, if not milk straight water, mixing it as described for the flapjacks. Make a dough soft but stiff enough to mold with well floured hands, make it into biscuits about half an inch thick, put them into a greased pan, bake them in any one of the ovens already described, or by propping them up in front of the fire. If the biscuits have been well mixed and well baked they will prove to be good biscuits.
The Vreeland Bannock