CREAM CORN PONES
(6 small pones)
1 C unsifted white corn meal
½ t salt
¼ C thick sweet cream
½ C boiling water
1 T melted lard or butter
1 t baking powder
1 T melted lard for skillet
Put corn meal into a bowl. Get the water-ground meal if you would have your pones taste the way ours do in Kentucky. Don't try to make this recipe with yellow meal. Add salt to meal and stir in the boiling water.
The mixture will resemble dry crumbs. Cover the bowl and set in the refrigerator an hour or so to chill. Just before you are ready to mate your pones, bring your corn meal mixture into the kitchen. Be sure that vour oven is hot by this time- -450° is about right. Add to meal mixture the 1 tablespoon of melted lard or butter, and baking powder mixed with the sweet cream. Stir well. Now the mixture should be a paste, firm enough to handle. Take heaping tablespoons of this paste and form them into croquette-like shapes, placing them in a preheated iron skillet in which there is another tablespoon of melted lard or butter. Then pat the tops with your fingers to flatten them slightly. Put pones in the oven and leave them there for half an hour. By this time they should be brown, and cooked on the inside. If not, turn them over and let them stay in the stove an extras minutes. Serve them piping hot with beans or greens or soup or salad, and allow at least two to each person. As with biscuits, you always "butter 'em while they're hot."
These pones are equally good made with thick sour cream. Use same amount as you would of sweet cream, but substitute ¼ teaspoon of soda for the baking powder.