Top Chef: Mount Vernon Edition
“He rose before sunrise, always wrote or read until 7 in summer or half past seven in winter. His breakfast was then ready – he ate three small mush cakes (Indian meal) swimming in butter and honey, and drank three cups of tea without cream.”
George Washington’s breakfast habits were recorded by his step-granddaughter, Nelly Custis Lewis, providing us an intimate picture of our first president’s mornings. Nelly also recorded the recipe for mush cakes (also called hoecakes because they could be cooked on a hoe over an open fire) in a letter so we know that they consist of cornmeal, water, yeast, and egg. Hoecakes are regularly cooked at Mount Vernon’s Pioneer Farmer site, and the full recipe is on our website and in publications.
Now, having sampled hoecakes made with the Mount Vernon recipe several times, I thought, “There has got to be a better way.” No offense to the father of our nation, but where’s the sugar? The processed flour? The butter!? He must have eaten them “swimming in butter and honey” because they really do taste pretty terrible on their own (I know I will be getting some perturbed emails over this post, sigh…). As educators, we advise teachers and parents to make hoecakes with their children as a fun learning activity, but children of the 21st century are not going to be impressed with the results. Taking matters into my own hands, I used cornmeal from our own gristmill to attempt to adapt the recipe slightly. After four batches of hoecakes that still tasted the same, i.e. terrible, a very messy kitchen, and an irritated husband/test taster, I had no breakthroughs. I had so hoped to find a secret ingredient to present to our loyal GWW readers. But then I realized that someone else had already found that secret ingredient… So let me present Paula Deen’s Food Network recipe for Hoecakes!
Tags: hoe-cakes, Nelly Custis Lewis, recipe
