Corncakes

     There's been a box of cornbread mix in the cupboard for quite some time.  The oven in my old-but-not-antique gas range is questionable at best.  It's not usually a problem for me, since I enjoy cooking on the covered grill; roasts and curries and holiday turducken or corned beef work out well in a graniteware pan over hot coals.

     I haven't tried to bake in the grill.  Breads are tricky and home baking was a high art until the introduction of thermostatic controls*.  There are ways around it -- most breads and small cakes can be microwaved, though you don't end up with much in the way of crust.

     The cornbread mix microwaves well enough, but I wanted to do something different.  Can't you make cornmeal pancakes?

     Of course you can!  A little more milk and some melted butter, and there you go.  I cooked up a batch this morning, golden brown and slightly crumbly, and when it comes to rising pancakes, I think they're better than the all wheat-flour version, a little sweet (as the boxed cornbread mix tends to be; modern people put sugar in it, having no idea how to make proper cornbread) and full of flavor.

     It's a nice change from the usual.
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* You can bake bread in a clay-dome oven, fireplace-side oven, or a cast-iron wood or coal stove, and plenty of people did.  But it's a skill with a long learning curve, especially judging and maintaining the correct temperature.  Both of my grandmothers would have grown up learning how to run a cast-iron stove with an oven, the latter addition patented in 1867, a decade or more before either of them was born.  They adopted improved stoves eagerly. (Unlike an earlier generation; Mom spoke of her grandmother's irritation at her grandfather, who would mark up the wood-stove blacking by flipping slices of potato onto the sides of it, to stick, sizzle and fall clear when cooked! Caught on a plate, the proto-chips were a treat for him and his grandchildren.†)  Later versions of those stoves included a dial thermometer in the oven door, but a number of methods were used to check temperature from early on -- the boiling point of water at 212°F gives you a low oven, and the ignition temperature of paper, 451°F (a number made famous later) a high oven.  While my covered grill offers the same air-and-damper controls as a cast-iron range, it has far lower thermal mass and is difficult to refuel while burning.  --Oh, I'll try some day, just to see how it goes.  The kitchen is a workshop with a highly-developed set of tools, prosaic though it may appear.
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† So what's in stove-blacking? Plumbago -- graphite, that is -- lampblack -- which is carbon -- and a binder, like fat or paraffin grease.  Tasty!  I don't suppose small amounts of pencil-lead and carbon are all that immediately bad for you, but the state of California has probably already checked and found they are carcinogenic.