Dodgers, Pone and Hoe-Cakes

The traditional foods of the American South are fondly remembered as “cooked the old-fashioned way,” and “much more palatable than food cooked in smothering stoves or furnaces, ranges or anything of the kind.” The following explanation of three forms of corn-bread is taken from Dr. Hall’s Journal of Health, submitted by a gentleman of Kentucky.

Bernhard Thuersam, Chairman
North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission
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Dodgers, Pone and Hoe-Cakes:

“A corn-dodger is not now what it used to be. Originally it was a corn-meal dumpling. In very early Kentucky times, the universal dinner, winter and spring, at every farm-house in the State, was a piece of middling bacon, boiled with cabbage, turnips, greens, collards or sprouts – cabbage-sprouts – according to the season. The pot, if the family was a large one, contained about ten gallons, and was nearly filled with clean pure water: the middling and the greens were put in at the proper time, to give them a sufficient cooking.

Almost always the cook would make with water and corn-meal and a little salt, dough-balls, throw them into the pot, and boil them thoroughly with the rest. They were called “dodgers,” from the motion given them by the boiling water in the pot. They eat very well, and give a considerable variety to a dinner of bacon and collards. A dodger in modern times is corn-bread baked in a roll about the size of your hand, and about three times as thick, and in my judgment is not a veritable first-rate dodger, unless when on the table it bears the impress of the cook’s fingers on it, placing it in the oven to bake.

A pone of bread is corn-bread baked in a skillet or small oven. The skillet or oven when at the proper heat is filled with corn dough, which when baked and turned out, is a pone of bread.

A hoe-cake is not now what it used to be. I do not believe there will ever be any more good hoe-cakes baked. I have an inextinguishable longing for hoe-cake, such as the black woman Jinny, my mother’s cook, always baked. It gets its name from the mode of baking. It was originally baked upon a hoe. An old hoe, which had been worn bright, was placed upon the live coals of fire, with the eye down, and on it the cake was baked. Now, hoe-cake is baked upon a griddle, or was before cooking-stoves came into use.

Corn-dodger, pone and hoe-cakes are different only in the baking. The meal is prepared for each in precisely the same way. Take as much meal as you want, some salt, and enough pure water to knead the mass. Mix it well, let it stand some fifteen or twenty minutes, not longer, as this will be long enough to saturate perfectly every particle of meal; bake on the griddle for hoe-cake, and in the skillet or oven for dodger or pone.

The griddle or oven must be made hot enough to bake, but not to burn, but with a quick heat. The lid must be heated also before putting it on the skillet or oven, and that heat must be kept up with coals of fire placed on it, as there must be around and under the oven. The griddle must be well supplied with live coals under it. The hoe-cake must be put on thin, not more than or quite as thick as your forefinger; when brown, it must be turned and both sides baked to a rich brown color. Yet the baking must be done with a quick lively heat, the quicker the better. Saleratus and soda, procul, O procul! Let there be nothing but water and salt!

(Social Relations in Our Southern States, Daniel Robinson Hundley, John A. Gray Printer, 1860, pp. 86-88)