Life Before IHOP - Hi, My Name's Johnny, and These Are My Cakes

You've just been transported back to colonial America. You've been up since dawn, doing colonial stuff, and you're hungry for breakfast. You open the cupboard to grab a couple of Pop-Tarts to toss in the fireplace. There are no Pop-Tarts. You decide to settle for some pancakes, and reach for the Bisquick. There's no Bisquick. Okay, you decide to make your own pancakes from scratch. You check for the flour and baking powder. Again, you are denied. The only thing you have is ground corn and water. What do ye do…what do ye do?

Make Johnnycakes! This video recipe, I did recently for About.com, shows how to make America's first pancake, the Johnnycake. Nowadays, the Johnnycake is nothing more than a regular pancake batter with a little cornmeal sprinkled in, but that's not what it used to be. I decided to stay true to the earliest johnnycake recipes I could find, which were just fried cornmeal gruel. The Indians showed the early settlers how to make a basic cornmeal mush, which pretty much kept them alive in the early days, before Pop-Tarts. Well, if you have leftover cornmeal mush around, and some bacon fat, and a frying pan, you can turn that cornmeal into the surprisingly delicious Johnnycakes. Check out this video recipe, and experience what breakfast was like 300 years ago. Enjoy. Click here for the transcript and ingredients.