Bread and Breakfast

“Bread I at first made of pure Indian meal and salt, genuine hoecakes, which I baked before my fire out of door on a shingle or the end of a stick of timber sawed off in building my house; but it was wont to get smoked and to have a piny flavor.” Thoreau at Walden describes precisely the “genuine hoecakes” or “Johny cakes” (as Amelia Simmons spells them in American Cookery) that were the staple breads of the colonists from the moment they discovered Indians wrapping cakes of corn in corn husks or grapeleaves to bake in the ashes of their fires. Such a wrapping would have prevented the piny flavor Thoreau complains of from his shingle, or stick of timber (called earlier a “spoon,” hence “spoon bread” and “pone”).