Cornmeal pancakes

½ c all-purpose flour

½ c cornmeal

3 tsp baking powder

½ tsp salt

1 Tbsp sugar

½ c hot water

¼ c milk

¼ c corn oil

1 egg

Preheat skillet over medium-low heat. Grease lightly. Mix ingredients well in a medium-sized mixing bowl, then drop spoonfuls of batter into the skillet to make small pancakes. These cook very fast, no more than a few minutes. When bubbles in the batter stay open, flip the pancakes over and cook for another 30 seconds or so on the other side.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week let’s make some pancakes--but not just any pancakes. These are cornmeal pancakes and not only are they super easy to make, it’s hard to mess them up and end up with gummy half-cooked batter inside as sometimes happens with regular pancakes.

I’ve made this recipe hundreds of times and I’ve never had any trouble with it, not even when I was a new cook. I originally got it from the Good Housekeeping Cookbook, which was the only one my mom owned except for a cookbook put together by our church, which she illustrated. There are things in the recipe I sometimes question--like, why does the water have to be hot? But because it turns out so perfectly every time, I’ve never tried to tinker with it.

Or so I thought. After I wrote that paragraph, I cleaned out the garage for a yard sale and actually found my mom’s battered copy of Good Housekeeping Cookbook--specifically, it’s called The New Good Housekeeping Cookbook, published in 1963. I found the cornmeal pancake recipe on page 488, called Southern Pancakes, and it turns out I have made small changes to it. The original calls for boiling water, not just hot. It calls for melted shortening but I’ve changed that to oil. And it specifies all sorts of fiddly little details I dispensed with immediately, because these are really forgiving pancakes that literally always turn out well.

You’ll need cornmeal for this recipe as well as all-purpose flour. I love cornmeal and keep it on hand the same way I do flour, in a glass jar with a screw-on lid to keep bugs out. Cornmeal keeps a long time and isn’t expensive.

You’ll also need one mixing bowl and a skillet, and a spatula. The mixing bowl doesn’t need to be big. A medium-sized one will do.

Turn the heat onto medium or just under and add just a tiny dab of oil. While the skillet’s heating, measure your dry ingredients into the mixing bowl, then add the wet ingredients. I just use water that’s hot from the tap. Mix everything really well with a big spoon, pressing out any flour lumps and making sure the egg is fully incorporated into the mixture. Batter will be runny.

By the time you’re done mixing, your skillet should be hot. Use the spatula to spread the oil around if you haven’t already, then push any excess oil to the edges of the skillet. Then use your big spoon and drop a spoonful of batter onto the skillet. In my skillet, I have room for three of these pancakes. They should be small. When I was a kid we called them silver-dollar sized, but I’m not sure kids today have seen silver dollars. Basically, if you’re adding more than one big spoonful of batter to a single pancake, you’re making them too big.

Now let them sit in the skillet without touching them for a few minutes. Watch them, because it’s really easy to tell when you need to flip them over. See how there are bubbles coming up in the batter and popping? At first the batter oozes together to mostly hide where the bubbles were, but as the pancake cooks, the bubbles will pop and the batter stays open, showing a little hole. When most of the holes stay open, it’s time to flip the pancake. I’ll put a picture of this stage in the show notes so you can see what it looks like.

So, flip the pancakes over. The cooked side should be more or less golden. If you see any blackened or very dark areas, you either waited too long to flip th