Forgoing Hot Takes for Corn Cakes

noseing around the grindstone in Usquepaug

The day after the election I had to get up early to meet a contractor and so was walking around feeling both sleep deprived and gut punched. Sober and serious. I teetered between exuding a rage fueled seething bad attitude, and wanting to be as gentle as possible to all living creatures around me, who were also likely feeling the vibrations of the shit show that we had all woken up into. 

I knew what I didn’t want, which was hot takes. The news would be full of them, social media would also overfloweth, fingers would point, data points would sing. But I have grieved enough to know that when your heart is broken, explanations sound like excuses and reason offers little in the way of balm. Others might want the hot takes, and I would be happy for people to take all of the takes that they needed. But I needed to leave them be. 

The thing that I could feel in my stomach was that the majority of this country was mean and hateful, or at best had talked themselves into believing that letting pass all of the specific manifestations of this meanness (i.e. the blatant racism and misogyny and lets not even speak of the cruel mockery of the disabled) by the president elect was in their best interest.  The belly of the news-media would digest it all around the clock and belch out theories into the dark of night. Pundits, posters, public officials and political analysts would be typing away speculating that it was male anger or Palestine or the Dem swerve to the right or not playing to the base on the left enough, or the fault of xyz demographic, or the cursed alignment of stars in the cosmos. I am not generally anti-analysis, but this was all sports radio in the background to me, describing the mechanistic details of a game that I could only appreciate as broad movements of bodies. 

The day after the election was also unfathomably beautiful in Rhode Island, if it was possible to believe that afternoons in America could still be beautiful. I had a lot of Fall planted bulbs to get into the ground at the place where I work: alliums, astilbe, anemone and asiatic lilies. And so I let the sun hit the back of my neck as I pushed away thoughts about all of the opinions that I didn’t want to hear. A friend and the college class that she was teaching would be coming in a couple of hours and we would need to give a tour to students - the same tour that we have given hundreds of times, so it shouldn’t be hard, but in the meantime, I could dig in the dirt, and this I speculated would be grounding. And then time got away from me and suddenly I realized that a gaggle of college students were behind me as I was stabbing the earth obsessively with a trowel in the guise of planting bulbs. From afar my activities might have passed as gardening, but up close, there was no denying that I was absolutely foaming and rabid and holding the trowel as one might a dagger. I stood up and tried to brush it off. “Just working through some feelings” I said jokingly.  And that is fine. I am fine with goofing about talking about emotions, but also I think that it's a politically ok place to spend time these days -- in emotion. After months of strategy and news cycle roller coasters and endless robot text messages from every politician telling you about some matching fund scheme, experiencing defeat of this magnitude on a visceral level is a reasonable way of moving through time. Like a mole underground learning its new environment through the dampness hitting its whiskers, I want to let myself feel my way through this new reality rather than make a mad rush to understand it. 

 I know that I am not going to be the first to be hit by the repercussions of where we’re headed as a nation, but I have little doubt in my heart that a wide variety of people, including those who I love will suffer. The years of the first Trump administration were not easy years in my world. I was working at a burnout clip on an overwhelmingly large project renovating the Wedding Cake House, which meant endless days of being filthy and for half of the year very cold. Between 2016 and 2020 a record number of people in my world died and it felt like I was stumbling around in a haze of grief. Some of these deaths were just passings that happened to occur during those years, but at least half were deaths of despair. Deaths that might not have happened if making ends meet with dignity didn’t seem so hard, if less homophobia/transphobia was spewed on the airwaves, if there were more safety nets, if policies didn’t make poor people feel like there were no options for them in this world, if being marginal in anyway was not an endless uphill battle both psychically and materially with few glimmers of hope.  

Before the election I had started writing about corn cakes, specifically RI Jonnycakes and had visited Kenyon’s mill in Usquepaug. Jonnycakes have been the subject of fierce debates in Rhode Island’s past, and I have been meditating on the value of low stakes fierce debates in civic life as a way of safely practicing at the conflict and disagreement that are an inherent part of community life. Are low stakes debates still possible in 2024, or have all stakes become inescapably too high in all ways for people to debate formerly banal things like if goose fat is the best thing to fry jonnycakes in, or if goose fat, is in fact too disgusting, bougie, alienating to vegetarians and where do you even get it*,to be the subject of a conversation that does not go off the rails? 

It is likely not the most important thing to think about right now, but I have written about my experiences with corn cakes as an offering to this moment in time, or maybe as a distraction from this moment in time. And also because I think that they are superbly delicious. 

On October 4th I went to Usquepaug RI, land of cornmeal and the following is my report, bracketed, as is my way, with a good deal of meandering through semi-related stories. My aim in this Substack is not to get into the classic myths and legends of Rhode Island, but about a year ago I started to feel the pull of the Johnny Cake (you may note that my spelling is inconsistent - “Johnny Cake” is the most common spelling “jonnycake” is the uniquely RI arrangement of letters). As most of you know, my day job is in arts administration, but given the world that we live in, this also means having an organizational side-hustle to make ends meet, and ours is running a Bed and Breakfast when our 2nd facility, The Wedding Cake House, is not used for hosting Artists Residencies. People hear B&B these days and their mind goes to the Air variety, however we are actually a regular old quaint B&B and by right of this legally required to serve breakfast to all of our guests who would like it. This might sound like fun, but let me tell you, keeping up with banana inventory is a fucked up ride. 

When I first imagined making breakfast for guests at the Wedding Cake House, I thought that we’d do something buffet style in the dining room and serve dreamy fluffy wedding-type layer cakes for breakfast. Not a normal breakfast food, but cake would be thematically relevant and perfectly decadent for a vacation and we could balance it by serving all you can eat steamed greens. In some ways this might characterize my delusions to a tee: believing that there is a general population that would be charmed by the dazzle of artistically frosted breakfast cake, and want to eat it alongside a heaping pile of kale topped with lemon and seeds. My nature relishes in finding balance in extremes particularly as it relates to the aesthetics of  corrupt and over the top sugar infested nightmare confection of cake and the simple yet magical healthiness of a giant bowl of steamed greens. However, it did not take much time to realize that most people just want toast and eggs and, like maybe a piece of fruit. Also we opened during covid, so there was no “buffeting”. We put together a breakfast menu as a form that people could fill out and have breakfast delivered to their room. It was pretty basic: hot beverages, muesli, fruit, yogurt, vegan yogurt, hard boiled eggs. 

It worked pretty well for a while, but then our reviews started popping off, and there was more demand, and suddenly we were selling rooms at a higher price point, and our reviews were mostly still pretty good, but occasionally people would complain about how we didn’t have T.V.s or toast. The T.V. complainers could go fuck themselves, we made clear that we didn’t have T.V.s - read the description and go somewhere else if you need a room with a big screen, but it did seem reasonable that we should be serving some other breakfast items. 

As Rhode Island has a few regional delicacies that are virtually unknown in other part of the world, we had the idea of serving “basic continental breakfast” items, alongside of a “Rhode Island Menu” this would obviously include coffee milk, pizza strips and cider donuts, and it seemed like it should also include jonnycakes, so I began researching the humble RI corncake. And then whoop, down the rabbit hole, I fell! I started to back away from believing that we should serve jonnycakes however, because one loose 5 year old and a jar of syrup can spell disaster like few other things in a Victorian mansion. I have a real aversion to the sticky. So we ended up going with Portuguese sweet bread toast, but still my brain was infected with the worm of knowledge about corn cake controversies, and so dear friends, I am here to unpack all of it with you and to tell you about going to the grindstone itself in Usquepaug, an unassuming hamlet supposedly split between Richmond and South Kingston. 

How big is Usquepaug? Unknown -  a couple of streets maybe? It has been difficult to find any map based delineation, however it was pretty easy to find the Kenyon’s mill. Supposedly at the height of the hamlet’s boom times, in 1865 the population hit 165. Then in 1866 the village’s largest mill burned down and was never rebuilt and the village has been declining in population ever since. A 1986 LA Times article placed the population at 35. However, in the same article it also quoted a supposed mail carrier working in Quonochontaug RI as a man named Ronald McDonald, so I’m taking all of the information in this piece with a grain of salt. In said article Paul Drumm Jr, the then owner/operator of Kenyon’s Grist Mill explains that: 

Usquepaug is an Indian word borrowed from the Scottish-Gaelic word for whiskey. He reached into a cabinet and brought out a bottle of Tullamore Dew Irish whiskey. On the back were the words Uisge Baugh, meaning water of life or whiskey. “The Indian version of Uisge Baugh was Wowoskepog, which became Usquepaug. So, however you figure it, Usquepaug, Rhode Island means Whiskey, Rhode Island,” he said.

I’m honestly a bit confused by this explanation. It should be noted that there is also a native group that calls itself the Usquepaug Nahantick Nahaganset Tribe, that was seeking state recognition in 2018. They have a very nice flag, but information beyond this is hard to gleen. A basic google search of the name predominately turns up a statement from Narragansett Tribal leader Sachem Anthony Dean Stanton addressing the issue of “splinter groups and social clubs”

I have a distinct memory of the first time that I read the Kenyon’s Corn Meal box. It was the late 90’s and my friend Beatrice and I were goofing off, laughing, squabbling and making corn cakes in her apartment, or maybe it was my apartment. It was always hard to tell, because her apartment was right next to my apartment and joined by a back hallway. It was in the Summer Street Compound that artists had been living in since the 1970’s. 

I had been living in 556 Atwells, another artist compound, but in the spring of ‘98 I knew that it was time to move out and so I rode my bicycle around endlessly looking for a place. I include this part in the story, because most of how I’ve found places to live has involved obsessive wandering, which is a pleasure in its own right. I would ride my bike down every street and take notes on all of the various former factory buildings. After a few weeks of this, I had some leads and knew the city far better, but I still hadn’t found a place. But then magically I was riding down a street at the edge of where South Providence meets Downtown and I saw some older artist/contractor types that I knew moving in and asked them if they had the landlord's number. I wrote it down, called the guy and the next day met him in the parking lot. He was very kind, but also about 90 years old. He knew that he had some open units, but we spent about an hour going through his box of keys and none of them seemed to work on the unit that he knew was empty. What to do when the landlord is too disorganized  to find the keys to the apartment? I had no idea, but I decided to sit down across the street and draw for a while. Eventually someone leaving the building noticed me and asked what I was doing. I told him the story. He laughed and said, “yeah, John (the landlord), is a great old guy, very fit and active for his age, but some pieces are starting to not add up”. Then he said, “I’ve got way more space than I need, I’ve got the whole 4th floor, I’ve been thinking of breaking it up and subletting, want to check it out?” “Sure”, I said. We rode the freight elevator up to the 4th floor. It was truly an awe inspiring amount of space with giant windows on both sides and about 30 motorcycles in various states of repair glimmering in the afternoon light that spilled in through the west facing windows. It was true that there was a whole section to the South that was totally empty. He offered that he was a contractor and could throw some drywall up pretty fast to section it out, and there was another staircase on the South side so I could come and go without needing to go through his space, it just might take a little while though to get a bathroom and kitchen figured out, but I could use his in the meantime. He also mentioned that he was shooting a pin-up calendar called “Real Women, Real Bikes”. It was like a classic nudie motorcycle calendar but the concept being that the bikes and women included were “real” i.e. all ages, body shapes and walks of life - the motorcycles not just those fresh off of the factory floor, and the black and white photography would be artful. “Sounds cool” I said. 

The next day I got a call from the landlord. He had heard that Richard (the motorcycle guy) and I had talked, and he wanted to let me know that he didn’t approve of me living with Richard. He’s twice your age and takes nude photographs he told me point blank. I told him that I knew both of these things, that the plan was not to live together, but rather to break up the 4th floor, and that I could handle myself thank you very much, but I also mentioned that perhaps we could try again to get into the apartment that he couldn’t find the key to through the back door? 

Then later that day Richard called and asked if I’d be in his calendar for $100. I told him that my parents would kill me if I was in a nude calendar, but that my best friend was very beautiful and might be into it; I gave him her number. 

Eventually the 90 year old landlord & I broke into the apartment's back door with a crowbar. The rear door was a cheap hollow core interior door and after prying it open, it never worked quite right, but so long as the exterior door stayed locked it was fine. The landlord asked how much I wanted to pay for the apartment. I told him $300 dollars. He said that the last tenants had paid $400. I said, well they were a couple and I’m just one person and Richard said that he’d sublet for $200. So he said $300 would be ok, but I had to figure out putting in new locks and keys. My best-friend did the calendar, as did a friend of mine’s mom. It was all class and supposedly Jay Leno bought a ton of them to give out as holiday gifts that year. I painted the walls of the apartment silver with gloss black trim, and then I built a narrow loft that was 16’ long and 4’ wide, which I’ve heard was how the apartment stayed for the next 25 years until the building was evicted en masse in the middle of the pandemic. 

After living there for about a year one night I was hanging out with Bea and the crew from the apartment in the back who were mostly all from South County and fresh out of URI. We were musing on how there were three interior doors in my back hall, but we only knew where two of them went. I had a crush on a kid who was part of that crew who wore thick glasses and probably in a plot to impress him, in an act of sheer bravado I attempted to kick in the door karate style. To my own shock and amazement, it actually worked and voila there was a whole secret empty apartment that Bea could live in. She called the landlord and said that she wanted the apartment, but that he didn’t have to worry about finding the keys. It was small and only had one window, but it had a bathtub, which I did not have, so between the two of us, we had a pretty ideal little compound. 

And so it was there that we were getting into it with a griddle and corn meal and I had this bread book open to a recipe that had said to boil the water first, but Bea wanted the jonnycakes to be thin and with apples. And so the aforementioned giggling and squabbling persisted.

 The book that I had was The Garden Way Bread Book, published in 1979 by Garden Way Publishing which was a back-to-the-land how-to enterprise. I note this because there’s still a lot that I want to unpack about this movement. It feels intimately connected to some DIY threads and values that are important to me, but there’s an aspect to it all that feels escapist, white-flighty, and maybe a little like cos-playing in search of a simpler time, which feels all too relevant in this current political moment - we don’t talk often of commonalities between Hippies and Maga-hats, as the times defining them are so vastly different, and yet some common threads, such as a looking backwards with longing, are there in plain sight. I had (and still have) this cookbook, which is set up like an almanac, offering different bread recipes for each month. I have held onto it, both because who does not want a hippie bread cookbook from the 70’s, but also because it features a photograph of my parents holding up loaves of home-made french bread in celebration of Bastille day. My parents, who had grown up in Vermont and gone to a lot of trouble to figure out how to get out of the state and transcend some of the economic limitations of small town life, had a complicated relationship with people moving from cities often with resources to Vermont in pursuit of old fashioned living. There is a long history of discomfort with settlers of various forms in New England: a tension between how someone with resources from afar might change ways of life for better or worse. The question seems to be if the risk is worth the bestowing of trust: if I treat this person as a complex human, will they in turn show me the same respect and consideration, or does their positionality in relation to resources always already make them predestined to betray my humanity. The economic possibilities for someone living in rural areas are so vastly different from urban, small city vs. big city, and so on. When I’ve been close to these dynamics, its hard to not see them as colonial in nature, but perhaps that is just because power differentials across land are so marked by colonization that it is ever present. I imagine an economic meteorologic map of America would read like hundreds of colonial micro-climates full of corresponding resentments and curiosities. Has the original sin of the betrayal of Native peoples contaminated all of the soil and the rocky terrain of our hearts and broken our potential to meet each other across varying relationships to power where geography intermingles with wealth gaps? Could the election results read as tea leaves mimicking a discombobulated class war? I push this questioning out of my train of thought. I’m still not ready for it. 

And so I think about corn. Or to be more specific corn cakes. Or to be even more specific Johnny cakes. Or to be Rhode Island specific spelled as one word with no “h”:  jonnycakes also possibly Journey cakes, or Shawnee cakes. Made by the Narragansetts probably going back into the 1400s or before, but who really knows. Could early settlers in Rhode Island have gotten through the winter without them, probably not but who really knows? 

I don’t remember what had gotten Beatrice and I deciding to make jonnycakes that day, but we could be like that. One of us having a weird idea and the other getting really excited about it, propping each other up and egging each other on. Her boyfriend Mike was hanging out with us that day and it seemed a bit unusual that he wasn’t joining in on the discussion of how to cook these things. One of Mike's core charms was that he had opinions. Even if he didn’t really have opinions, he’d quickly form them on pretty much anything as almost an ethic of social engagement. But he just sat quietly to the side being vaguely amused by our antics. Finally I think I directly asked him, “What to you think, add boiling water?” He said, “we should probably look at the box and see what it has to say”. This was an interesting and logical suggestion, but also slightly suspicious as Mike was not the kind of person to bow to the authority of like, packing.  

And then, there it was, in blue type on white chipboard it read “As all Rhode Islander’s will agree, there is only one correct recipe -- and that is their own!”. I stood flabbergasted for a moment. Were Beatrice and I the butts of a practical joke hundreds of years in the making? Are Rhode Islanders really so wild-willed that no singular recipe could unite them all?  Could anything be more decent than a live and let live neighborly approach to the crafting of corn cakes? Could more meaningful disagreement be diffused by low-stakes controversy over fried mush? Mike stood with a grin on his face like a 6 year old kid who has successfully not spilled the beans about a surprise party. 

So we agreed to disagree and made multiple batches, one thin with apples, and another batch of thick ones made with boiling water. They’re totally different beasts, one a dessert vibe, the other I like to describe as if Keebler elves made a soft batch cookie version of Fritos.  

So what is at the heart of the Jonny Cake controversy? Well, some might say that it is the oil. And some might say that it is the approach (thin and large or small and puffy) but the most persistent controversy has to do with the recipe, and since it is basically a one ingredient concoction, we’re clearly getting real specific, and we’re talking about the kind of corn used. There is a faction that believes that unless a jonnycake is made out of heirloom Narragansett white cap flint corn, then it is not a proper RI Jonnycake. Purity can often be a trap. White cap flint corn has less rows per ear and less ears per stalk than almost all of the corn that is commercially grown today. Many strains of corn that were grown in North America before colonization have not made it into this era, but the insistence on using this corn for Jonnycakes has meant that a variation of the original is still out there today. Its worth noting that seeds are always slightly morphing and changing - they are not reproduced by mechanical means, so the relationship between the copy and the original has the potential for some chaos each year and multiply that by hundreds of years, and of course it can not be said that the white cap flint corn is the same as that of 400 years ago. Just as the oak trees that grow on this land today are not the same as the oak trees that grew 400 years ago. Ecosystems change and flora and fauna adapt and change with it. At the grist mill the man showing us the grind stones told us that there was an initiative at URI to try to breed the corn to be more like how it was pre-colonization.  I am charmed by this but also struck by the irony of yet another variation on looking for authenticity by trying to recreate a relic of a past time in this land. 

The grindstones themselves were a thing to see, but really the magic of a “tour” like this of a site that is both functional and totally historic,  is to hear the stories of people who have devoted their lives to maintaining the businesses and places that preserve some sense of our imagined collective past. The man, who I am guessing was maybe a grandson of Paul Drumm Jr (quoted above) was a bit like I had imagined, capable of shifting gears from selling things at the gift shop to being the handyman and running the mill, to packing boxes, dealing with the kayak rental side business that they run on the river that once powered the mill, and then back to being a story-teller. He brought more Native history than I had expected into his spiel and explained that, people always think that it took settlers to come to mechanize the grinding of corn and to use technology to take labor out of agricultural processing, but that the native people had their own technology, they weren’t just smashing corn up entirely by hand in a mortar and pestle day and night. They often tied the pestle up to a branch of a tree so that human labor was used to bring the pestle down, but the branch and its endless springy-ness growing towards light, provided the labor of lifting the pestle up. 

For a long time Kenyon’s mill hosted a Jonnycake festival, but it got put on hold when Paul Drumm Jr. passed away, and the hold carried over for a number of years and now its been almost a decade. I asked about it and somehow we got to talking about RI Commerce Corp and the man told us that Kenyon’s does not do business with Commerce Corp. And this felt almost full circle. If you talk to anyone with a small business in Rhode Island, eventually, likely they will tell you if they love or hate RI Commerce Corp. It is unlikely that this is as low-stakes as liking your Jonnycakes thick or thin, but as something that Rhode Islanders have opinions about it might be as ubiquitous. I said that I hoped that the festival would make a comeback, and left with both the classic Kenyon’s Johnny Cake mix, and a bag of heirloom Narragansett white cap flint corn. I feel a little like I’m make-believe living in another era when I cook them up (which I see as a semi-dangerous gate-way drug to nostalgia, which in turn is an ingredient in the bat-shit delusional thinking involved with making things great again) but these corn cakes are too delicious to overthink. I make them thick with boiling water, my recipe is a slight deviation from the classic so I’m writing it out below. I mostly like them savory with a big pile of greens, but occasionally I’ll have them with a little syrup or maybe some strawberry jam. 

**************************************

Recipe: 

Put water on to boil

If you want to be an ultra purist heat up a cast iron pot that nobody has ever cleaned with soap (kidding not kidding) - if you are less interested in historical reenactment feel free to use whatever non-stick skillet you like best

Measure a cup of Jonnycake cornmeal

Add 1tsp salt & 1tsp baking soda - some people add 1tsp sugar, but I am not one of these people - that’s it - mix the powders together 

Add 1 and a quarter cups boiling water, 1tsp of lemon juice, stir, and let it sit for a minute

I usually use olive oil, but freak what you feel when it comes to the fat - if you love bacon grease, well, its your arteries friend

Use a big soup spoon to scoop out the dough/batter onto your pan. Some people swear by a let them sit for 6 minutes before you touch them and/or flip them over approach, I think that if you’re using a more modern pan, this doesn’t matter as much. I’d say that I probably do about 5 minutes on each side

* It is not suggested that you acquire goose fat by wildly chasing geese, however it can not be fully discarded as an option.

Further Reading:

ECO RI Oct 10 2024: https://ecori.org/the-deep-indigenous-roots-of-rhode-island-corn/

Yankee Jan 2022: https://newengland.com/yankee/history/rhode-island-jonnycakes/

NY Times July 1981

NY Times June 1999