The Cornbread Gospels (2 page)
Read The Cornbread Gospels Online
Authors: Crescent Dragonwagon
No one could write about corn without acknowledging, in the largest, deepest way, the contribution of countless generations of America’s natives. Without them, there would be no maize. I hope my grateful respect to those ancient nameless ones who, through most careful observation and with great generosity, co-created maize can somehow come wafting up to them across time and space, rising like smoke from a smudge of sage.
Lastly, David Richard Koff: with whom I didn’t fall, but walked, slowly, into love. As we walk still, and walk onward, and make our path by walking, please know that I consider this, our mutual reawakening, a daily miracle, astonishing as bread.
(And Mollie adds, “If you takes me meaning, sir.”)
I hope, as each of you read your name, you feel the specific and individual hum of gratitude, respect, and love I have for you. Thank you for tethering me to life, before, after, and during. And right, right now.
Crescent Dragonwagon
Saxtons River, Vermont
ONTENTS
The Gospel Truth About Cornbread
Southern and Northern: What’s the Difference?
What the “H” Is a Jonnycake, and Other Yankee Hanky-Panky
Chiles, Tortillas, and Flame, Oh My!
Muffins, Biscuits, Cornsticks, Gems, and Other Little Baked Corn Cakes
Soaring Soufflés and Pleasing Puddings
Pancakes and Other Griddled Cornbreads
Fritters, Hush Puppies, and Other Fried Cakes
Greens, Beans, and So Much More
Cornbread- and Cornmeal-Based Desserts
The Gospel Truth About Cornbread
What if, in a world where news is too often bad, where the future, never certain, seems especially tenuous and fraught at the present moment, there were a happiness-giving magic word that automatically brought forth love, enthusiasm, recognition, and pleasure?
There is such a word. Cornbread.
“Cornbread? I
love
cornbread!”
I discovered cornbread’s true power about six years ago, when, in response to being asked “And what are you working on now?” I’d say, “I’m writing a book about cornbread.” Instantly, almost invariably, I’d get a response nearly shocking in its suddenness, conspiratorial delight, and universality. And this was no default have-a-nice-day-okay-let’s-move-on-to-the-next-thing
smile: this was real, as unfaked—and as unfakable—as real cornbread.
That ability to call forth joy, and memory? That’s cornbread’s mojo.
Oddly, those who know and love cornbread seem to feel their fondness is unusual. The fervency with which they express it, along with the fact that someone else shares these same deeply personal feelings, seems to surprise even them. But cornbread-love, like all love, is universal and deeply individual. Even now, when I have grown to half-expect it, this rapturousness at the word itself is as unlikely an illumination as a sharp ray of sunlight, all the more abrupt and lit-up because it is piercing gray November clouds.
BUNDANCE AND
R
HYTHMS
“Cornbread” is also a password of admittance into an astonishing number of private clubs. Since just talking about cornbread makes people happy, perhaps it’s natural that once the subject’s arisen, they keep talking. Spontaneous exclamations and smiles of recognition are followed by a story, usually involving a family member. Sometimes this in turn is followed by a recipe: described, recalled, scribbled on the back of a card or napkin, e-mailed a week or two later. Many of those recipes are here, now. What was once someone’s personal cornbread gospel is now ours, and I know that because of that generosity and good grace, the lives of all concerned are richer.
We share that richness here. Together in this book we’ll bite into homemade corn tortillas, hot, pliable, and seductive, straight from the griddle. We will carefully get buttery cast-iron skillets smoking hot, and then pour in the cornbread batter we’ve made. We’ll hear it sizzle invitingly as it hits the hot skillet, and we’ll discover and rediscover, after baking, that that instant of contact results in the most amazingly good crisp-crunchy golden brown crust, a revelation and a joy to bite into. We will make the simplest of corn pones, both American– and Colombian–style (the latter are called arepas), their shapes embossed with the loving imprints of the fingers that patted them out. At first bite these may seem plain to us … but then we take one more and then another until … oh! Where
did
that platter of pones go?
Some of our cornbreads, confetti’d with the Southwestern kick of chiles, will do a quick salsa-merengue in our mouths. We’ll find we love this, as we also love the waltz of maplesweetened cornbread from Vermont, the hip-hop of eggy high-rising Southern spoonbreads, the do-si-do of cornbreads jeweled with fresh corn cut off the cob, and the slow fox-trot of moist pudding-like cornbreads rich with sour cream and canned creamed corn.
We’ll taste not only the abundance and rhythms and stories of cornbreads themselves, but the delectable choices about what to eat with them: chilies, stews, hot pots; beans; greens. And then there are the what-to-eat-with-its
that actually incorporate cornbread: dishes like Golden Gazpacho (
page 266
) and Southwestern–Style Cornbread Casserole with Chorizo (
page 281
). And though, because cornbread is so good, you don’t often have leftovers unless you set out to, we’ll also investigate what to make with the occasional overflow of this cornbread generosity, such as cornbread dressings and luscious cornbread bread puddings, both sweet and savory.
Breakfast, lunch, and dinner; as an after-school snack; sweet or savory or neutral; at feasts ranging from Thanksgiving to Kwanzaa, in cities ranging from Bombay to Boston … we will discover, bite by bite and recipe by recipe, why and how cornbread is almost always a part of every meal, every occasion, somewhere in the world.
OVE
, H
OME
,
AND
H
ISTORY
I started out knowing I was neither the first nor the last to love cornbread; I also knew that as a writer, I tend to fall in love with my subject. True,
I
was utterly hoodooed by cornbread. But so, I discovered, was almost everyone else. Until I unexpectedly found this out, I had no idea how widespread cornbread’s enchantment was. None of the subjects of my previous books, culinary and otherwise, evoked this instant, intense response, this ability to walk right into the lives and stories of others, regardless of their background, nationality, education, or age.
Why, I began asking myself, is cornbread so powerful to so many?
I’ve pondered this during the almost-six years I’ve worked on
The Cornbread Gospels.
What I think now is that while there are many answers, the most universal is this: Cornbread is not usually restaurant food. It is rather, as a London Pakistani taxi driver once told me, “a homely food.” (Yes, they eat cornbread—with greens—in Pakistan and North India, too. Cornbread-love is a worldwide thing.)
Home. That potent place, both physical and not, from which we all come; for which we all long; which we all try to create, recreate, or imagine; but from which, through circumstances that may be beyond our making or control, we may be exiled. As human beings have always been exiled, right back to Adam and Eve.
Home. If cornbread, even momentarily, takes us back to the home we had, or the home we wish we had had, or the best parts of the home we did have, no wonder it is powerful. No wonder we want to tell our stories. And no wonder cornbread tastes so very good to us, no wonder we love to talk about it almost as much
as we love to eat it. As the writer Betty Fussell says, “Corn breeds its own poets, lunatics, and lovers.” And so, of course, does home. When you put the two together, it’s compelling.
Cornbread has opened doors I couldn’t have imagined. Doors into homes and lives, all over the world. Doors to an arepa factory in the Florida Everglades and the home of a Colombian children’s book writer in Vermont; a tortilleria in East Los Angeles; a Hopi reservation in Arizona; a cornbread festival in Tennessee; mills in Rhode Island, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Oregon; to a mail-order tortilla-making supply company in Texas. Doors to the kitchen of an haute resort in Scottsdale, Arizona. Doors to family reunions, church picnics, and potlucks from Mississippi to Maine, Florida to Washington. Doors to literature, history, ethnobotany, and folk culture. Doors to memories, written and oral:
this is the cornbread that Truman Capote grew up eating … this is the cornbread that my grandfather fixed every Sunday, he was the designated cornbread maker … this is the cornbread that my mother was raised on in east Texas and I still think it’s the best I ever ate.
Doors that opened other doors.
And behind almost every door, a recipe.
How could it be otherwise? No other single food has been the subject of more passionate discussion, on and off the record, than cornbread. Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglass, Henry David Thoreau, and Mark Twain are just a few of those who wrote heatedly about cornbread. No other single food has more purely American historical and cultural connections, from the worship of Mother Corn, the Corn Goddess, by Native Americans, to the survival of the Pilgrims, to the New World’s gradual, then vigorous disputation of the Old World’s smug insistence that maize was fit only for cattle, to its darker history, that of staple food to those once enslaved in this country. No single food native to America has become more essential to the survival of so many different nationalities around the globe.
UR
C
ORNBREAD
, N
OW AND
F
OREVER
, A
MEN
