Digging Hoecakes

Earlier this month, I ate a splendid stack of hoecakes. I was at Jeneane’s in Macon, Georgia, a downtown breakfast and lunch spot of the Vinyl Booth School, favored by jurors and lawyers on leave from the nearby county and federal courthouses.

Jeneane’s hoecakes are three inches in diameter and a quarter-inch thick. They are crusty at their edges and creamy at their core. Dream up a cross between cornpone and blini and you’ve got a close approximation. Instead of using them to convey caviar to my maw, however, I smeared margarine (that’s all they had) on one and sopped up potlikker with the other.

Cornbread is elemental. At its simplest, it’s nothing more than freshly ground meal, boiling water, and salt. Fry this same mixture in shallow fat, on a griddle or in a skillet, and you have what is known, variously, as spiderbread or dogbread; it also goes by a dozen other names, including hoecake.

Although the meal-water-salt formula is traditional, most hoecakes, including the ones at Jeneane’s, are now enriched with milk, buttermilk, or eggs. Some cooks add cracklins to the mix. (At Brooks Shaw’s Old Country Store, set within sight of the interstate offramp in Jackson, Tennessee, they make a great and greasy cracklin’ hoecake.)

When it comes to hoecakes, I’m a purist about ingredients, by which I mean I accept the addition of egg or milk or cracklins, but I curse the recent trend toward sugar. All that said, I’m open to any number of hoecake applications.

My favorite has long been the marriage of hoecake and pork barbecue. Drive through north-central Tennessee, especially around Nashville, as well as south-central Kentucky, especially around Bowling Green, and you’ll note that any number of barbecue joints sub hoecakes for buns when building sandwiches of hacked pork shoulder.

Papa KayJoe’s BBQ in Centerville, Tennessee, was the first place I took note of the style. (That’s their offering in the picture above, taken by my colleague Amy Evans.) 

Over in Nolensville, Tennessee, at Martin’s Barbecue, proprietor Patrick Martin serves an open-face version that he calls a Redneck Taco.

Speaking of pork and corn: At a special event dinner in Louisville, Kentucky, I once ate a frisée salad, on top of which John Castro—the chef at a local student-run teaching restaurant, Winston’s—had perched a kinda-sorta sandwich of crispy pork, Camembert, and a sunny-side-up egg, all tucked between two griddle-cooked hoecakes. It wasn’t a Redneck Taco, but it was good.