Hoecake

A hoecake is a member of a family of corn-based flat breads collectively called pone – a cornbread made without eggs or milk, and usually fried, not baked.

A hoecake is not a pancake. Though they look somewhat similar, a hoecake is not stuffed full of eggs, sugar, and leaveners. It is cornmeal, salt, and water. A hoecake is also not an arepa. A hoecake is made with plain cornmeal, not precooked, nixtamalized corn flour.

History

In The Story of Corn, Betty Fussell says that colonial cooks saw cornmeal batter as “the sad paste of despair.” It was a long time before hoecakes and other corn breads became matters of regional pride.

Etymology

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term hoecake first appears in printed form in 1745. Washington Irving mentions hoecakes at least twice in his satirical History of New-York (1809): Philip Vickers Fithian mentions it in his journals from the 1770s; and British soldier in the 1770s refers to cornbread: “Negroes bake it on hoes that they work with.” With that evidence, I thought I was on solid ground in saying that this was the origin of the term. Nope.

But like the word “sad” in sadirons, the word “hoe” has another, older meaning. It is an obsolete word for griddle or peel, like the one to the right.

The word “hoecake” came not from the practice of cooking cornbread on agricultural hoes (which clearly did happen), but from griddle hoes. As Mr. Cofield states, “From a naming standpoint, the term hoe used for a cooking implement as early as the 1670s strongly suggests that when colonists baked a mixture of Indian corn (or wheat) and liquid on a peel or griddle, this food item became known as a hoe cake. The name stuck even when a hoe cake was cooked in a skillet or pan.”

Yes, enslaved laborers (and white laborers too, no doubt) did cook cornmeal on agricultural hoes, but that isn’t the origin of the word hoecake.