It is still eaten in the Bahamas, Belize, Nicaragua, Bermuda, Canada, Colombia, Curaçao, Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Saint Croix, Sint Maarten, Antigua,[2] and the United States.

[14] Indigenous peoples of the Americas using ground corn for cooking are credited with teaching Europeans how to make the food.

[17] Corn was used to make all kinds of dishes from the familiar cornbread and grits to liquors such as whiskey and moonshine, which were important trade items.

Early cooks set thick corn dough on a wooden board or barrel stave, which they leaned on a piece of wood or a rock in front of an open fire to bake.

[23] Johnnycakes may also be made using leavening, with or without other ingredients more commonly associated with American pancakes, such as eggs or solid fats like butter.

[3] According to the manuscript of America Eats, a Works Progress Administration (WPA) guide to American food culture in the beginning decades of the twentieth century, Rhode Island "jonny cakes" were made in the 1930s as follows: In preparation, [white corn] meal may or may not be scalded with hot water or hot milk in accordance to preference.

After mixing meal with water or milk it is dropped on a smoking hot spider [pan] set atop a stove into cakes about 3"x3"x1/2"[a] in size.

The secret of cooking jonny cakes is to watch them closely and keep them supplied with enough sausage or bacon fat so they will become crisp, and not burn.

[24]In Australia the bread usually known as damper, made with wheat flour rather than cornmeal and cooked as smaller, individually-sized portions, is sometimes called "johnny cake".

According to Mark Catesby, an English naturalist who visited North America and the Caribbean in the early 1700s, "Their bread is made of Maiz, or Indian Corn, and also of Wheat; the first they cultivate but not sufficient for their consumption.

Yaniqueques or yanikeke are a Dominican Republic version of the johnnycake, supposedly brought over in the nineteenth century by English-speaking migrants (possibly of Afro-Caribbean descent).

[1][16] A modern jonnycake is fried gruel made from yellow or white cornmeal that is mixed with salt and hot water or milk, and sometimes sweetened.