Johnnycakes and Hoecakes

Corn-based hearth-breads were, along with cornmeal mush, the two Native foods most important to European colonists and early American farmers, and hoecakes became the staple food of African slaves and many poor farmers through the nineteenth century. Rhode Island johnnycakes are still regionally popular. When they are cooked as simple unleavened pancakes from ground Narragansett white cap corn, water, and salt—they are almost exactly the way they were eaten by Native Americans for millennia. George Washington’s favorite breakfast at Mt. Vernon was described as three simple mush cakes, but “swimming in butter and honey.”