X: Garden Hoe
Let's learn how to make hoecakes.
Good morning. Today is décadi, the 20th of Floréal, Year CCXXXI. We celebrate le sarcloir, a long-handled hoe meant for digging up weeds or tubers.
Let's keep today's entry brief and informative because hoeing is hard work and we've done it once before this year already.
There's a traditional southern American food called hoecakes. These are the same as johnnycakes, if you know the food by that name, and they are essentially non-sweet cornbread pancakes.
The name originates in Revolutionary America – they're said to have been served by George Washington at Mount Vernon to guests – and has a number of equally plausible origin stories for the name johnnycake:
- A shortening or slurring of the word "journey cakes" because they were a good saddlebag food.
- A shortening or slurring of the word "Shawnee cakes" after the tribe who taught colonizers how to make them.
- An Anglification of the Shawnee word janiken, meaning corn cake.
But in the South, where the food is most common today, you'll hear of them as hoecakes, not because they resemble animal scat dug up by a hoe in the farmyard, but because "hoe" is also an old slang term for a griddle.
Here's a recipe from Amelia Simmons written in American Cookery from the year IV (1796):
Scald 1 pint of milk and put to 3 pints of indian meal, and half a pint of flower – bake before the fire. Or scald with milk two thirds of the indian meal, or wet two thirds with boiling water, add salt, molasses and shortening, work up with cold water pretty stiff, and bake as above.
A few things to note: the milk here is definitely buttermilk, which was assumed for any baking recipe of this era before refrigeration; "flower" is flour, not petals from random plants; "indian meal" is cornmeal; and it's remarkable how many old recipes boil down to "grab these ingredients and just vibe with it."
Modern recipes tend to add an egg for fluff, and recommend frying in bacon fat to impart some flavor. You're welcome to add in maple syrup or sugar but at that point, just make pancakes. The point of these is to be savory, crispy, and long-lasting. You know, something you can pull out of your overall pockets during a long day of hoeing.
Today's card: Queen of birds (spades)
The effect of making an unexpected move in conjunction with an erstwhile enemy is going to galvanize our work energy and jumpstart that part of our life (which we had perhaps been neglected due to a new relationship). There's really no better outcome from a conflicting king card than a complementary queen outcome card.
