Johnnycake

A cornmeal flat bread that journeyed with native Americans and became a patriotic symbol for New Englanders

Mar 27, 2025

Two weekends ago, my husband and I drove an hour and a half and crossed into a different state to try this dish for breakfast. We arrived to East Greenwich, Rhode Island, around 9am and headed to Jigger’s Dinner, a quaint vintage diner that welcomes you from its blue ennamel entrance to a room full of locals that come for the classics.

And one of them is no doubt their griddle johnnycakes, which is what I had come for, specially after reading this review by food writers Jane & Michael Stern:

“Jigger’s is the best place we know to eat West Bay—style Rhode Island johnnycakes. […] The West Bay cakes that Jigger’s makes are chubby little rounds, scarcely two inches wide and at least two fork tines thick, with a crunchy brown surface sandwiching the moist, steamy meal within. Their sandy texture and unalloyed corn taste are deliciously anachronous; to eat them is to savor the most fundamental American foodstuff.”

Jigger’s diner, East Greenwich, Rhode Island

I ordered 4 of them while Ross got an Irish-inspired breakfast of corned beef to benefit from the Saint Patrick Day’s specials. His meal was full and appetizing, while my johnnycakes looked a bit lost in the plate. I asked the server how she recommended me to eat them, as it was my first time trying them. This caught the attention of another server that after the first one said “people normally eat them with syrup and butter”, she added “I like mine with black pepper! Savory!”.

I take breakfast very seriously, and even though this was a work-related-reseach kind of breakfast, I was hopeful. I had imagined fluffly corn pancakes, a similar flavor profile to corn bread, cake-like. But they were nothing like it. And while Ross enjoyed his plate with a cheerful mood, I stared at mine hoping this would, at least, end up being an interesting newsletter.

What is a Johnnycake

My confusion may have had something to do with the name, as a johnnycake is in fact, not a cake. The Cambridge dictionary defines it as “a kind of flat bread made with cornmeal that is usually fried on a griddle”.

At Jigger’s they make them with corn milled at Kenyon’s Grist Mill, only 17.5 miles away (28 km), which not only offers different types of corn to make these flat breads, but also a very special variety that was once the only one allowed in Rhode Island to cook the real thing.

An acticle published by Pamela Petro in The New York Times (April 18, 1993) explains it well: “A Rhode Island law enacted in the 1920's dictates that true jonnycake meal must be derived exclusively from white cap flint corn grown and stone ground in Rhode Island. Cornmeal pancakes made from anything else are merely johnnycakes.” We will get to the name and “h” later, but let’s continue understanding what this corn is. Petro explains:

“Johnnycake meal is made from white cap flint corn, originally a species of wild grass domesticated by American Indians, and notoriously difficult to grow and to grind. […] Because of the low yield, kernels of white cap, also known as white flint, have been bred to grow around the ends of the cob, forming a small crown or cap, hence the name. The corn is deserving of the flint in its name as well; of all the varieties of corn, it is far and away the hardest. For some reason, white cap flint corn is especially suited to the soil of Rhode Island.”
Pamela Petro, The New York Times (April 18, 1993)

Kenyon’s Grist Mill sells this indigenous variety of white corn from New England, purchased from a few traditional farmers that still harvest a limited quantity. They stone grind it and call it “Rhode Island Flint Jonny Cake Meal” —whithout a “h”—. Their regular 24 oz bag of stone ground white corn meal costs $8.80, while the same size bag of flint corn meal goes for $13.

Another corn mill that still opts for traditional ways to produce corn flour is Gray’s Grist Mill, located on the other side of Narragansett Bay, near Little Compton. It’s one of the oldest, continually running grist mills in New England, operating since it was built in the 1670’s. On the eastern shore of Narragansett Bay, johnnycakes are usually thinner and crispier, and each version has their supporters:

“Of course the most heated arguments occur over the “correct” way to make them: Debates about the merits of South County (West Bay)-style (thick, made with boiling water) vs. Newport County (East Bay)-style (thin, made with cold milk) have even reached the Rhode Island legislature. It’s enough to work up a healthy appetite.”
Aimee Tucker, New England Magazine (Jan 28, 2022)

When was it created

As we have seen with Indian Pudding and with Boston Brown Bread, when the English settlers arrived to what is now called New England in the early 17th century, they had to rely on a native grain — corn— for they survival, as their preferred one — wheat— didn’t grown well in the sandy soil they got stablished in.

In this case, johnnycake was derived from a bread eaten by native peoples. European explorer Samuel de Champlain testified that “the natives reduce [corn] to flour, of which they then make cakes like the Indians of Peru”1. Scholar Kathleen J. Bragdon, after studying the native people living in the New England region in the time of the European settlers, assumes that the natives used cornmeal “to make cakes, and other baked or fried breads sounding remarkably like tamales or tortillas”2.

Curiously, the migrants to New England knew a similar kind of bread from back home. In Scotland, Wales and northern and western England they used to eat unleavened baked oat-cakes that made the southerners turn their noses up. That’s what said southerners also encountered when they crossed the Atlantic, though.

“The settlers found themselves using native grain to make a bread similar to the one that the <<savages>> had always made. Back home, their abstention from breads of this sort had distinguished them, or so they thought, from the semisavage Scots, Wesh, and northern English. Now, this distinction had collapsed in practise, which probably made clinging to it in theory all the more vital”.
Stavely and Fitzgerald, America’s Founding Food, 30

Both Scottish oat breads and the eastern Amerindian corn unelavened breads were dependable food for travelers. In his historical account New England Prospect (1639), William Wood descrives how New England natives, sustained by a bread made of corn and water “will travell foure or five daies together, with loads fitter for Elephants than men”. He was the one responsible for transforming this native travelling food into cake, transliterating the Algonquian word “Nókehick” to “Nocake”.

“The best of their victuals for their journey is Nocake, (as they call it) which is nothing but Indian Corne parched in the hot ashes; the ashes being sifted from it, it is afterward beaten to powder, and put into a long leatherne bag, trussed at their backe like a knapsack; out of which they take thrice three spoonfulls a day, dividing it into three meales”. Wood, New England Prospect, 71

It seems to be this connection, made by Wood and others, between native travels and Nocake, which gave the common name of “journey cake” to the flat corn bread. How it evolved into Johnnycake is even more interesting.

The journey to a national symbol

It seems the term “journey cake” was used until the end of the War of Independence, when it was substituted by “Jonny” in honor of Gov. Jonathan Trumbull, also known as Brother Jonathan. 19th century student of Rhode Island cookery Thomas Robinson Hazard explains: “It was for this latter reason that the whole Yankee nation, and especially New England, became finally sobriqueted, characterized, and identified in the person of Brother Jonathan”3.

Moreover, the name “Jonathan” became in the early days of the newly created country, “a generic name for the people of the United States, and also for a representative United States citizen”4.

So “johnnycake” went from meaning a well-travelled bread to becoming a national symbol. And as such it appears in the first cookery book written in the United States:

Johnnycake recipe by Amelia Simmons, *American Cookery* (1796)

The change of name also represents moving away from the “savage” connection between the flatbread and the natives, that used to travel instead of being “securely anchored to one plot of ground”5. The English settlers copied a native American bread, against their will, while the new citizens of the United States reappropriated it transforming its name and nature into a patriotic emblem.

This is the reason why many recipes of this time include milk, molasses and call for baking it, making a distintion to the original Nókehick/Nocake/journey cake.

“As their [the English] temporary status as journeying emigrants began to evolve into their eventual identity as settled Jonathan/Johnny New Englanders, so they put milk from their cows into the journey cakes they got from the natives, baked the cakes in the massive homestead fireplaces that sharply distingueshed them from the natives, and turned native journey cakes into New England and American Johnny cakes”
Stavely and Fitzgerald, America’s Founding Food, 33

Johnnycake vs. Jonnycake

In the late 19th century, after the War of Independece, journey cakes became johnnycakes, but a 100 years later, the word would take one more shift.

The word “cake” got stuck in the term due to the historical referrence to Nocake and also because in the 17th and 18th century it didn’t necessarily mean what we imagine nowadays. It was a term used to describe any small bread, pan-fried pancakes or baked sweetened batters. The Johnnycake has actually also been called hoe cake or spider cake, referring to the tools —hoe-like paddles and the “spider” frying pan— used to cook the breads.

The argument didn’t come from the cake part of the word, but for the forename part of it. Thomas Robinson Hazard explained the proper term should be Jonnycake, so as not to place “Johnny Bull’s Christian name before a genuine Rhode Island Jonny-cake, and thereby immortalize the name of America’s former perfidious foe, instead of the honored name of Jonathan Trumbull, the steling American patriot”6.

The dispute for the correct spelling of the name originated in Rhode Island, where they belived the beloved corn flat bread had originated. Sandra L. Olivier, researcher of Yankee foodways in the 19th century, explains that in the 1870s Rhode Island “Jonnycakes without a “h” were in this region a distinct food item, an unleavened mixture of white flint corn meal, salt, hot water, and perhaps a dash of milk to thin it, fried on a griddle in lard, or preferably salt-pork or sausage fat”7. She says that “Jonnycakes without an h are to be sharply distinguised from Johnnycakes with an h, which had become by the mid-nineteenth century a quick bread similar to our modern day cornbread”8.

It seems it was not only Rhode Islanders who were frying their johnnycakes, though, as similar recipes from other New England states ask for a “slightly greased skillet” or for a “greades griddle”. Still, having become part of the national American pride, it also became part of Rhode Island’s identity, and in the last decade of the 19th century, a Rhode Island law obliged to spell the term without the “h”.

By that time, a debate between Newport and South counties in the ocean state also occured regarding the proper way to make a Jonnycake. The dispute — whether it was best to make them thick and with water or thin and with milk— was not resolved. Instead, what got into a 1920s Rhode Island law was the type of cornmeal used, as a real jonnycake (without a “h”) was to be made only with white flint corn meal.

In Jigger’s, the diner where I ate my 4 johnnycakes for breakfast, they spell it with a “h”. It could be because they don’t use white-cap flint corn or because they are beyond the orthographic dispute. I was told they are just made with corn meal and water, and then griddled. I had them with some warm butter and simple pancake syrup, though you can also order them with maple syrup, very relevant to the current sugaring season.

As I ate them disenchantedly, I noticed in the menu they also offer the johnnycakes as part of other meals: Johnny Cake Combo (2 Johnny Cakes, 2 eggs, fresh fruit and choice of bacon or sausage), Johnny Cake & Sausage Benedict and Santa Fe Benedict (spinach, black beans, Johnny Cakes, sliced avocado). And then, I remembered another review I had read:

“Jigger's Diner is most famous for their Johnny Cakes. Justifiably so. Made from white cornmeal, close to fried grits, they're great for sopping up egg yolk or drenched in maple syrup.”

I didn’t really enjoy my johnnycakes, but maybe I would have like them better as a side dish, to “sop up egg yolk” or to be eaten with cheese as they do in Colombia with their arepas. After researching on the history of this flat bread, I realised it didn’t remind me of a pancake at all but of an arepa, and I called my friend Luz, who is from Cali, Colombia.

Luz explained arepas are eaten differently in different parts of the country, and in the neighbouring Venezuela, arepas are filled up with savory ingredients. In the paisa region of Colombia, arepas are a small and round side bread that are eaten with beans, eggs, meat, and rice, amongst others. While in the region where she is from, arepas are bigger and flatter, and eaten mostly for breakfast just with some cheese on top. Normally grilled, in the Caribbean region they are also fried, taking a more similar form to the johnnycakes we are discussing today.

With a “h” or without it, “Americanized” with syrup or without it, johnnycakes are, more than anything else, a humble expression of an indigenous ingredient —corn— that nourished people for thousands of years throughout the entire continent.