Homestead mailing list

[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

>  I don't know anything about the Alonguin spelling for corn  
> cakes, so won't comment on the derivation of the term, but I have made "hoe 
>  
> cakes" on the open hearth, both on a hoe blade (

But that's the interesting thing.  I first came across that tidbit in a book 
titled "The History of Corn", don't recall the author, but it was a ponderous 
tome divided into chapters called:  Botany, History, Religion, Cuisine, 
Economics, etc.  and each chapter looked at the entire history of corn from 
that 
perspective.  Fascinating.

It was there I garnered the fact that when, among others Benjamin Franklin, 
was writing about a proposed wheat embargo to starve the rebelling colonists, 
he said they couldn't care less because they had plenty of good bread in the 
form of "hokek" which he explained was the local Algonquin word for 
cornbread.  

We English speakers have a fascinating habit of hearing a term we don't quite 
understand and converting it to the closest English word that fits it.  
Everyone knows that Jerusalem artichokes have nothing to do with Jerusalem.  
They 
are native to Virginia but in their wanderings around the kitchens of the 
world 
seem to have made a lingering stop in Italy.  The Jerusalem artichoke is a 
type of of sunflower and when the Italians saw them growing they called them, 
what else, sunflowers, or 'girasole'.  English speakers, hearing the Italian 
name for the tubers, thought someone might be trying to say "Jerusalem" and 
so 
the name has stuck.

Here in the southern Appalachians the bush that bears pointy clusters of dry 
berries which make a good citrusy drink are called Shoe-Make  bushes.  I 
often 
wondered what they had to do with making shoes, until I found out that most 
people call them "Sumac" bushes.  Again, bending an unfamiliar word to fit a 
common English word.

Even the cornbread we are talking about is called in some places a 
Johnnycake.  It has been speculated that it is a corruption of 'Journey 
Cake'.  Yet the 
earliest literary references call the food 'Jonakin' or 'Jonikin' imitating a 
now extinct Indian word.  Another guess is that Johnny Cake is a corruption 
of 
Shawnee Cake.

Speaking of the Shawnee, they were Algonquin speaking people, the word 
'Shawnee' in Algonquin means 'Sountherner'.   People here about who came into 
contact with them heard them refer to the the bread baked in the coals as 
'apones' = 
'baked'.  To this day a "loaf" of cornbread is refered to as a 'pone'.  We 
didn't manage to corrupt that term into a common English word so it has 
endured.

But in colonial America, the early writers and commenters fully recognized 
and appreciated where their food originated and said frankly it is what the 
Indians call, 'hokek', or 'hokkek', or 'hokeik'.  Just as with Jerusalem 
artichokes, shoemake bushes, and johnnycakes, someone less savvy about the 
heritage of 
the food heard someone refer to it as hokek and said, "Whaaa?  What'd he say? 
 
I think it was hoe-cake."

But here is the most fascinating part.  Do we have any historical references 
to cornbread being baked on the blade of a hoe.  The person writing the 500+ 
page book on the history of corn found none and I've never seen any.  What we 
have, and this happens amusingly often, is the explanation of an unfamiliar 
term being given a fanciful but plausible history.  I've seen reenactments 
and 
living history displays where they dutifully attempt to bake cornbread on a 
hoe 
in order to give life to story that in all likelihood only exists is a misque 
of the actual history of the word.   </HTML>