The Cornbread Gospels (59 page)

Powered buttermilk is available at virtually all supermarkets, and it’s pretty good. (It’s used in the Toasted Sesame Multi grain Pancake Mix on
page 212
.) Reconstitute it according to package directions.

Buttermilk, soy:
Vegans or the lactose-intolerant can easily make a buttermilk substitute by putting 1 tablespoon lemon juice in the bottom of a liquid measuring cup, and topping off to 1 cup with plain, unflavored soy milk. Stir a few times with a fork. It will thicken slightly. Use wherever dairy buttermilk is called for; it works perfectly. See also
Vegan ingredients, substitutions for.

Cake flour:
A very heavily bleached low-gluten wheat flour, preferred by some for the extreme lightness it gives cakes. Being no great fan of refined products or extreme lightness in baked goods, I have found a happy compromise: a combination of cornstarch (which is gluten-free) and either unbleached white flour or whole wheat pastry flour. To make it, sift together ¾ cup plus 2 tablespoons unbleached white or whole wheat pastry flour, plus 2 tablespoons cornstarch.

Canela cinnamon:
See
Cinnamon.

Cinnamon:
As beloved an American as the apple pie it typically seasons, cinnamon is cinnamon—right? Wrong. There’s a reason I usually specify “canela or Saigon” when I call for cinnamon. What Americans call “cinnamon” is actually several different related spices.

The cinnamon tree,
Cinnamomum zeylanicum
, is native to Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon), and has long been cultivated in India as well. (Because Christopher Columbus set off on his voyages in search of spices, particularly cinnamon, it was wishful thinking that made him label the people he found here “Indians,” to everyone’s lasting confusion.)

The spice above is true cinnamon, usually called “canela,” “mexicali cinnamon,” or “Ceylon” cinnamon in the U.S. It’s the tree’s fragrant, soft inner bark. Hand-harvested, rolled into papery, easily shattered reddish brown rolls, called quills, its flavor is delicate but persistent, naturally distinctly sweet, and a little warm in the mouth. In Britain, Australia, and many European countries,
this spice and only this
may be legally labeled “cinnamon.”

But in America, it’s legally permitted to allow cassia, a more harshly flavored but less expensive Chinese relative of cinnamon, to be labeled cinnamon. Though similarly flavored, cassia (
C. aromaticum
) is thicker, tougher, and has a pronounced, slightly bitter or acrid undernote along with the sweet warmth. It’s often used in savory Asian dishes like Chinese “red-braised” foods. A stick of cassia is much harder to break in two than true cinnamon, and its rolls curl inward toward each other, scroll-like.

Throughout this book I have specified canela or Saigon cinnamon.
Huh—Saigon?
How did Saigon jump in here? Well, just to further complicate matters there is a third variety of cinnamon,
C. loureirii
, which is Vietnamese. Its quills scroll inwards like those of cassia sticks, but are thinner and smaller, and its flavor is like an extra-rich version of canela, with a sweet floral twist to its fragrance and taste.

I get my cinnamons—both canela/Ceylon, and Saigon/Vietnamese—from
www.kalustyans.com
.

Cornmeal, colors of:
Corn, and hence the meal made from it, comes in almost every color of the rainbow, but yellow, white, and blue cornmeal are the most readily available, thus the most familiar. Although cornmeals are identical in some ways (you can substitute a cup of stone-ground white cornmeal for a cup of stone-ground blue, allowing you to switch among the colors of meals you use in a particular recipe), there are differences beyond the visual. Some are indisputable: yellow cornmeals (and, if you can find them, red cornmeals) are higher in beta-carotene than white; blue cornmeals have the highest protein content of all cornmeals.

But the more important differences are aesthetic. A particular color of meal in each recipe is specified because it is traditional to that recipe and, in some cases, to the part of the world in which the recipe originates. Subtle
flavor differences somehow suit certain sets of ingredients, and there are just obvious affinities: for example, a blueberry muffin just
should
be made with blue cornmeal (which can be purchased at
www.wareaglemill.com
or
www.bobredmill.com
).

To some of the descendants of the original corn planters, these color differences have spiritual significance; they are the symbolic alphabet of Zuni and Hopi cosmology, and human’s place in it. North is yellow, west is blue, east is white, and south is red: The universe’s story is told in corn. See also
Cornmeal, whitecap flint.

Cornmeal, grinds of:

Cornmeal, bolted:
A processed cornmeal that contains the germ but not the bran. It’s a bit more nutritious than degerminated cornmeal, but it still does not count as a whole grain.

Cornmeal, enriched, degerminated:
This meal is made from corn that has had its germ removed to improve the cornmeal’s shelf life (the germ contains high levels of oil, which can spoil over time). Because it is fortified with synthetic versions of the vitamins and minerals lost during processing, it’s called “enriched.” In my view, this doesn’t cut it. Period. But this is the one you will find in every American supermarket.

Cornmeal, grits:
Coarsely ground cornmeal, often used for cooked hot breakfast cereal or polenta. Like all grain products, grits can be refined (whiter, uniform, degerminated, quick-cooking, available in virtually every American supermarket), or whole-grain and artisanal (stone- or water-ground, coarse, irregular, full of flavor and texture, slower to cook, far more nutritious). The latter is my preference (no surprise), and I have used it for testing the recipes in which coarse-ground meal is called for.

Cornmeal, high-lysine:
Because traditional cornmeal was notoriously lacking in lysine, which is one of the essential amino acids (vital building blocks of protein), a hybrid dent corn was selectively bred to compensate for this in the 1970s. This was considered a huge nutritional breakthrough at the time, and there was quite a fad over it in health-food circles. But the buzz has since faded, for Americans as a rule get plenty of lysine from other sources. However, its taste is sweet and good, and it has a slightly longer shelf life than many other wholegrain corn products. If you come across it, by all means give it a try.

Cornmeal, masa harina:
see
Masa harina.

Cornmeal, polenta:
The Italian name for grits, above. Unlike American grits, however, which may be white, grits for polenta are almost always golden-yellow and usually are served as a side dish or main dish with something savory, at lunch or dinner, not as a hot sweetened
breakfast cereal. A versatile staple in Italian cooking, polenta also shows up, under different names, in some perhaps unexpected cuisines, including Romanian, Argentinean, and Brazilian. It’s also become popular in America. An exception to the yellow polenta rule: Anson Mills, in Columbia, South Carolina, makes a delicious white polenta, in addition to yellow and a special rustic coarse polenta from an Italian corn variety (see
www.ansonmills.com
for products).

Read your polenta labels: Some varieties are more quick-cooking than others, though even the so-called instant takes about fifteen minutes.

In an Italian grocery or specialty store, you may run across a product called
polenta taragna
, which is the characteristic golden yellow but speckled with tiny bits of some thing darker. That something is coarsely ground buckwheat, and its haunting, distinct nutty-toasty-grainy flavor is very special as part of polenta. It is cooked the same way as all-cornmeal polenta.

Cornmeal, self-rising:
This is enriched, degerminated cornmeal to which salt, baking powder, and baking soda have been added, saving the cook the time needed to add these three ingredients. I don’t generally like it for the same reasons I don’t generally like any non–whole-grain grain product. However, a few of the recipes in this book do call for it, because that is the way they were given to me and they were just too tasty to leave out. If you want to make your own self-rising cornmeal, just substitute the following for the commercial kind: 1½ cups stone-ground yellow cornmeal plus 1 teaspoon baking powder, ½ teaspoon baking soda, and ½ teaspoon salt.

Cornmeal, stone-ground or water-ground:
This is just what it sounds like, cornmeal that is made by grinding dried corn between two large stones. When the grinding stones are powered by water, as in a streamside mill, it is sometimes called water-ground. I strongly urge you to use stone-ground cornmeal instead of its less expensive steel-ground cousin because it just tastes more like
corn
than the steel-ground meal does; it’s richer in flavor and nutrients because it retains more of the hull and the germ, and it does not reach the high (and flavor-killing) heats of commercial steel-roller mills. Also, stone grinding means that the particles of ground corn are inconsistent: This is what gives good cornbread the characteristic grittiness it must have.

Stone-ground cornmeal is more perishable, so for longer life, especially in hot weather, be sure to store it in an airtight container in the fridge or freezer. It will last there for 2 to 3 months.

Cornmeal, whitecap flint:
The key ingredient in Rhode Island jonny-cakes,
whitecap flint cornmeal is ground from the corn variety of the same name, which is notoriously difficult to grow and just as difficult to grind. If you do not live in or near Rhode Island, you can order whitecap flint cornmeal from Gray’s Grist Mill (
www.graysgristmill.com
) or Kenyon’s Grist Mill (
www.kenyonsgristmill.com
), both located in the Ocean State.

Corn syrup:
This sweet, sticky liquid is made from cornstarch and contains mostly glucose. It’s available in dark and light, with flavor variations loosely parallel to those of dark brown or white sugar. Although corn syrup is different from the high-fructose corn syrup that is widely used to sweeten soft drinks and has been getting much bad press lately, it is still a processed sugar, and too much of it has all the drawbacks of too much of any sugar. While corn syrup is sometimes used in baking to create a moister crumb, you’ll find only one bottle of corn syrup in my pantry, used once a year: when I make pecan pie at Thanksgiving.

Creamed corn (sometimes called cream–style corn):
Originally, creamed corn was fresh corn scraped from the cob and cooked in its own milky juices with a little heavy cream. Today, however, this product has come to be a thick, somewhat sweet canned mixture of corn kernels, sugar, cornstarch, and salt. Canned creamed corn finds its way into quite a few cornbread recipes, where it adds considerable moisture to the finished breads. If you prefer the idea of using fresh creamed corn, you can make it from scratch. Simply buzz together in a food processor about 2 cups corn kernels, cut from 3 or 4 ears of fresh corn (see Shuck and Jive,
page 49
), with ½ cup milk and 1 tablespoon each of honey and cornstarch. This makes an amount equal to one 14.75-ounce can.

Eggs:
Whenever possible, try to purchase eggs from local free-range chickens fed an organic diet. (The eggs are more flavorful as a rule, have brighter yellow yolks, and have more of the healthful antioxidant beta-carotene.) Or try “natural” eggs from the supermarket or natural foods store; several larger egg companies now guarantee their eggs are from “cage-free” hens (not the same as free-range, however) fed an “all natural, vegetarian diet enriched with DH Omega-3 and Vitamin E.”

Egg replacers:
Due to their unique properties in the kitchen, in some recipes eggs are problematic to replace. This is an issue both for those who are allergic to them, and for vegans. While powdered egg replacers (such as Ener-G), crumbled tofu, applesauce, and ground flaxseeds are often offered as alternatives, in an (egg)shell, I don’t think any of these works as well as the real thing, at least not in baking. (You can, however, make a darned good scrambled tofu for breakfast if you are so inclined.)

Because we had the occasional can’t-eat-eggs guest back in the days when Ned and I owned and ran our inn, I developed my own, homemade egg replacer for baking, which I called Eggscellence. It’s a dry mix that you reconstitute as needed. In any
non-custard-y
baked-good or griddled recipe calling for one or two whole (unseparated) eggs, Eggscellence (recipe below) works as well as the real deal; my tasters literally could not tell the difference between the fabricated and real eggs in a blind tasting of muffins (they could with every other common egg substitute mentioned above). And oh my goodness, did I ever make some vegans and egg-allergic folks happy! Muffins, cookies, brownies, yeast breads, as well as cornbread: If the original recipe calls for 1 to 2 eggs, this works like a charm. If it calls for 3, it usually works. But if the recipe calls for 4 or more, pick a different, less eggy recipe. And don’t, certainly, try it as a substitute in a recipe where eggs dominate. No quiches or soufflés, for instance. In the recipes in this book, it will work just fine in almost any cornbread except the spoonbreads, the three-layer-custard cornbreads, and the custardy dessert bread puddings.

Eggs do a lot of things in baked recipes: they emulsify (bind and incorporate ingredients into one another smoothly); add structure as the dish bakes (high heat firms up proteins); leaven or lighten just a bit; and add moisture, flavor, richness, and color. Eggscellence mimics these functions. It uses soy flour for protein, potato and/or tapioca starch for binding, and baking powder for leavening. The last and most unusual ingredient called for is xanthan gum. This, like the potato or tapioca starch, is another gluten-free carbohydrate, but in addition to binding, it adds volume, emulsifies, and gives a little egg-like viscosity. It is a natural product from a microorganism called
Xanthomonas campestris.

Most importantly, Eggscellence is reconstituted at the time of use with water
and
liquid lecithin, a bright, golden fatty substance found both in egg yolks and soybeans. The lecithin emulsifies and enriches flavors, and also adds a bit of color. (Refrigerate liquid lecithin once you’ve opened the bottle.)