The Cornbread Gospels (40 page)

4.
Using as few strokes as possible, stir the buttermilk mixture into the flour mixture until the two are barely smoothed out. Then stir in all the vegetables.

5.
Spray a heavy nonstick skillet with oil, then place over medium-high heat. When it’s hot, ladle on the batter; using a ¼-cup ladle will yield about 12 good-size pancakes, which will make 4 Mexi-Stacks, see right (a slightly smaller size is good for these when you’re using them as a side dish). Flip the cakes when the tops have plenty of bubbles and the sides look done, 2½ to 3½ minutes. The second side takes 1½ to 2 minutes.

6.
Serve hot from the griddle.

Make the masa variation of the cakes. Open a can (15 ounces) of black beans and pour the contents, juice and all, into a small saucepan. Heat the beans through while you assemble the following on a tray:

• 1 cup grated sharp Cheddar or Monterey Jack cheese

• 2 or 3 ripe Hass avocados, peeled, pitted, and coarsely mashed in a small bowl with the juice of ½ lemon and a little salt

• Homemade or bottled salsa

• Dairy or tofu sour cream (optional)

• Chopped fresh cilantro (optional)

Have 4 heated plates ready. As the cakes come off the skillet, lay 1 in the center of each plate. Spoon the hot black beans over them, dividing equally. Sprinkle the grated cheese over the beans, and top with a second cake. Quickly spread the mashed avocado over the second cake layers, and top with a third cake. Spoon the salsa on top, add a dab of sour cream and a snowfall of cilantro, if using, and serve immediately—to many wows.

M
AKES ABOUT
8
CREPES

In 1982, long before I became Cornbread Cupcake of Concupiscence (I began signing e-mails this way to a select few during the late phases of writing this book), I was introduced to this lovely, delicate crepe by my dear friend and longtime pan pal Jan Brown. She in turn learned it from
her
friend Wanda Ross. The recipe’s secret? Masa harina. It makes a crepe that is exceptionally tender and flavorful.

Crepes may be the little black dress of the food world: They can wrap almost anything and make it look and taste good; and they can serve as appetizer, main course, or dessert; for breakfast, lunch, dinner, or a snack, depending on filling and presentation. Wanda’s soft corn crepes are divine with anything, but the flavor of the masa harina makes them especially good with Southwestern tastes: A black-bean-and-corn filling with cilantro, the filled crepes dabbed with guacamole on top, is hard to beat. A sauté of onion, summer squash, and chile and bell peppers is another possibility, as is shredded chicken with sautéed mushrooms, a poblano-accented white sauce, green chile sauce, and a little grated cheese.

1 egg

1 cup milk

½ cup masa harina (see Pantry,
page 354
)

1 heaping tablespoon unbleached white flour or 1 level tablespoon cornstarch

½ teaspoon salt

Vegetable oil cooking spray and butter, for the pan

1.
Place the egg, milk, masa harina, flour or cornstarch, and salt in a large bowl. Either whisk the dickens out of the batter or pour it into a food processor and buzz until thoroughly combined. Let stand for an hour.

2.
Heat a crepe pan—that is, any 5½- to 6-inch skillet with rounded sides, nonstick or cast aluminum or stainless steel. Spray it with oil and place it over medium heat. When the pan is nice and hot, brush it with a bit of butter.

3.
Once the butter sizzles and then stops sizzling, pour in just enough batter to coat the pan thinly. Shake the pan to distribute the batter evenly, and cook the crepe until the top side has a slightly duller, drier finish, 30 seconds to 1 minute. Flip the crepe and let it cook for another 30 seconds, then slide the finished crepe onto a plate to await whatever filling you might wish to give it, placing wax paper between crepes. Please note, the second side of a crepe never browns as prettily as the first.

• • • • • • • • • •

Let it be stated, unequivocally and up front, that I am not now and never will be a member of any Frequent Fryers club. But, assuming that you, like me, want to try at least occasional fried cornbread sojourns, I am about to present both the objections to this cooking method
and
strategies for how to overcome them.

Are you ready to take the “Who’s Frying Now?” Challenge? Yes? Good. Let’s begin.

True or False: Fried foods are high in fat, hence high in calories, hence fattening.
True
—
if eaten to excess.
Strategy:
Eat them only occasionally. Fry at the proper temperature, which is between 360° and 370°F, 365°F being ideal. Use enough oil at this temperature, and the fried foods will absorb comparatively little. Foods fried in oil that’s too cool or in not enough oil will wind up absorbing more.

True or False: Fats are unhealthy.
True-ish.
This is myth mixed with truth.
Strategy:
It’s as unhealthy to omit fat from the diet wholly as it is to eat too much of it. That said, there are healthier ways to ingest fat—such as olive oil on your salad or butter on your toast—than by deep-frying or pan-frying foods in fat. Still, you can minimize fried foods’ deleterious effects by careful choice of fat and proper cooking method.

True or False: Heated fats are unhealthy.
True,
unless you are extremely careful. Oxidation (when foodstuffs deteriorate on exposure to air) is almost unavoidable when oil is heated. Other kinds of deterioration also take place when moisture or escaped particles of food (from whatever’s being fried) release into the oil. These changes collectively promote rancidity, whereby oil undergoes changes on the molecular level. Some of those changes have been implicated in heart disease. Finally, even light and heat—such as the heat in a hot kitchen—can cause oil to deteriorate.
Strategy:
Again, think “occasional” and “proper heat, 365°F.” Choose pure, fresh, refined (purified) vegetable oils with as high a smoke point as possible, preferably stored in the refrigerator after opening (some people even store oils there
before
opening).

The smoke point is the point above which the oil will burst into flame. You want oils with smoke points higher than the magic 365°F. Good choices: corn and peanut (450°),
untoasted
sesame (410°), canola and grapeseed (400°), and safflower (510°). You can combine these if you like; corn-canola and peanut-safflower are both good combinations. In addition, never,
ever
reuse the same fat for frying on two separate occasions, even if you strain and refrigerate the oil. Plus, eat all fried foods as soon as possible post-frying.

True or False: Frying leaves your kitchen curtains smelling like you’ve fried something for quite some time.
True
—but corn fritters, hush puppies, and the like do not seem to linger as long as fried chicken, which hangs out for a month.
Strategy:
Open the windows (if feasible). Turn on the exhaust fan (if you have one). And does your kitchen really
need
curtains, anyway? Also, if you use fresh refined oil and you use it only once, the linger factor is fairly minimal; not like when you walk past the funnel-cake stand at a fair and feel your pores and arteries seizing up from the heavy smell of hot, overused (rancid) fat.

True or False: Frying is one of the most dangerous of cooking methods, both because of handling all that hot, slippery fat and because fat easily catches fire.
True.
Strategy:
To prevent accidents with hot fat spilling, use a heavy skillet or pot or Dutch oven with a flat, absolutely non-tippy bottom, handle turned inward to avoid the risk of bumping into it and knocking the hot fat off the stove. Make sure children, pets, and anything or anyone else who might get underfoot are out of the way. And leave the pot of hot oil at the back of the stove until it cools before moving it.

To prevent fires from fat, keep the deep-fry temperature at 365°F (use a frying thermometer to monitor the temperature), and keep a heavy pot lid handy to clap on the frying pan in case the oil does catch; depriving the fire of oxygen is the most effective way to stop it. If you have salt or baking soda handy, either of those, also amply sprinkled, will douse the flames. But never, ever use water in any attempt to extinguish a fat-based fire; it only spreads it. Always make sure there are several inches of pan above the surface of the fat, too. Finally, every kitchen should have a small, accessible all-purpose fire extinguisher.

Why, when there are so many drawbacks and hazards, would you
want
to become a member of even the Occasional Fryers club? Well, as the credit card people used to say, membership has its privileges. Straighten out and fry right, and you end up with foods that are moist and cooked (by the trapped internal steam) and light on the inside yet covered with an incomparable brown, crispy-crunchy exterior, rich but not greasy, whatever sugars are present having caramelized nicely. After the particular food undergoes its bubbling, transformative bath in the perfectly-hot-but-not-too-hot fresh oil, the resulting hush puppies, corn fritters, and other fried corn delights are quite addictive. Therein lies their problem as a treat: You inevitably want to eat too many of them.

But life would be less without fresh, height-of-summer corn fritters or spicy-crisp hush puppies, or other such oh-so-munchable fried delights. I say, eat them once in a great while, and then eat as many of them as you want to, with abandon.