johnny cake
1
8.0
- noun
- /ˈdʒɒni keɪk/
- US
:
tortita de maíz
- At the local festival, I tried a delicious johnny cake topped with fresh berries.
Examples
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Johnny cake and devil's food and sassafras tea
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I think the world doesn't know Jell-o from johnny cakes.
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If you do, your rations'll be Johnny cake and devil's food and sassafras tea
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For breakfast, we enjoyed warm johnny cakes served with butter and syrup.
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The recipe for johnny cakes calls for just cornmeal, water, and a pinch of salt.
Synonyms
316
1.0
A thin, flat fried cake made from batter often eaten for breakfast
1
2.0
A flat food like a pancake made from cornmeal and cooked on a pan
1
9.1
A flat cornbread pancake cooked on a griddle and often eaten for breakfast in New England
A thin cornbread cooked like a pancake on a hot pan
A flat bread made from cornmeal by the Shawnee people
A small flat cake made from ground corn, usually fried or baked and served as a side
Surface Forms
Morphology
johnny + cake
The component 'johnny' is essentially a proper/name-like element with no semantic cue to cornmeal or pancake, while 'cake' only signals a generic baked/food item. Because the specific meaning (a regional cornmeal griddle cake) is lexicalized and culturally specific rather than compositional, a B1 learner who only knows the parts would not reliably infer the MWE's meaning.
Etymology
Johnny cake may come from an old name, 'journey cake', because these flat cakes made from cornmeal were easy for travelers to carry. They were cooked on a hot pan and kept well, so the name came to mean the simple cornmeal pancake we still eat today.