The Cornbread Gospels (10 page)

S
HUCK AND
J
IVE
: F
RESH
C
ORN OFF THE
C
OB

Fresh corn, cut from the cob, is needed for many cornbreads, muffins, most corn fritters, and things like corn chowder, kernel-sparkled salads, or truly incredible from-scratch creamed corn or succotash. Removing the corn is not difficult, but
is
certainly more time-consuming than dumping out frozen kernels.

Since most kernel-corn–containing recipes taste good with frozen corn, why go to this trouble? Because fresh-kernel corn takes “good” to a whole other galaxy. It ramps up the corn flavor itself, a pronounced taste of
corn-ness
that frozen just can’t achieve. And then there’s the texture: tiny explosions of sweet milky corn juice as you crunch down on fresh kernels … summer in your mouth.

To make corn shucking and cutting slightly less messy (remember: each cob yields about ½ cup off-the-cob kernels):

1. Shuck the corn, removing as much silk as you can. Working one cob at a time, hold the cob upright in a wide, shallow bowl or glass pie pan, stem end of the cob down. Take a sharp chef’s knife and slide the blade down the cob, fairly close to the cob. You’ll get about 2 or 3 rows of kernels with each slice. Rotate the cob and proceed down again, continuing to rotate until most kernels are removed. Then lift the cob over the shallow bowl and, using quick, short knife-strokes, cut off the remaining kernels at the ends of the cob, where there’s a slight inward curve.

2. Save de-kerneled cobs to make corn stock, or toss them into the compost.

·M·E·N·U·

C
ICADA
S
ONATA
S
UMMER
S
UPPER

Salad of Baby Arugula, Diced Yellow Tomato, Minced Scallion, and a Sprinkling of Crumbled Raw-Milk Gouda Cheese, with Kalamata Olive–Mustard Vinaigrette

*

Navy Bean, Tomato, or Zucchini Soup

*

B
READBASKET
:

Yankee “Spider” Cornbread with a Custard Layer

or

Land of Milk and Honey Custard-Layered Cornbread

*

Fresh Strawberries, Raspberries, and Blackberries, with Brown Sugar, a Teensy Grind of Fresh Black Pepper, and a Splash of Kirsch or Aged Traditional Balsamic Vinegar of Modena

“Spider bread … is sliced as a pie. A large piece of butter is placed on top of each slice and it is eaten with a fork.”

—I
MOGENE
W
OOLCOTT
,
The Yankee Cookbook, 1939

M
Y
F
IRST
C
ORNBREAD

About seven years ago, my mother, Charlotte, who’s now in her nineties, was decluttering her kitchen. I saw, in the giveaway pile,
the bowl
: a large, heavy glass mixing bowl with a rosy-beige exterior and milky white interior. When you broke an egg against its side, as I did when I made cornbread in it as a girl, the sound was satisfying and the break clean.

First cornbreads date from childhood. Mine, baked in the same kitchen my mother was clearing out, was in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, from a mix. When you opened the box, a cellophane bag with the mix itself rested neatly in a flimsy, very shiny aluminum pan, good for one use only. Could you get any more ’50s, any farther from cast-iron skillets and from-scratch, than that?

Charlotte Zolotow, née Shapiro, was born in Norfolk, Virginia. She claims to remember almost nothing about it; her speech has no Southern inflection and her family moved north when she was young. I’ve always suspected, though, that she was more influenced by the region than she either knows or lets on. Her mother, aunt, and three cousins remained in Norfolk; she visited them often. One endearment she and her sister, my Aunt Dot, use to this day is “honeychile,” and my mother’s social style is what I came to recognize as the classic manner in which Southern women were (to some extent are) schooled: graceful, charming, genteel, effusive in thanks, indirect, quite certain (despite or because of this) to get their way, and capable of summing up others with wicked, deadly accuracy (generally only in private company, after a gin and tonic or two).

My mother, a good cook, specialized in entrées. I took to baking from the first, and took over the post as
designated family cornbread baker early on, using the mix with its cunning mirror-shiny pan, one step up from a doll’s baking dish. This cornbread, very sweet, rose with a slightly domed center. In our house it wasn’t served with any of the tried-and-true cornbread matches: not chili, soup, greens, or beans. And it never accompanied meals. Instead, it was a snack, always served with butter and honey.

Don’t these cornbread beginnings seem shallowly rooted, unsoulful, for someone who would grow up to be a cornbread aficionado?

Well. At the 2003 National Cornbread Festival in South Pittsburg, Tennessee, I met a couple named Stephanie and LeBron Colvin (see
page 268
), both Southerners.

By this point in my cornbread research I’d begun to question what are often promulgated as the clear-cut, decisive differences between Northern and Southern cornbreads (see
pages 34
–
36
). Yes, there were general “as a rules.” But exceptions to these abounded.

When Stephanie told me about the sweet, square Virginia cornbread she had grown up on,
always served with butter and honey,
my cornbread roots deepened: Suddenly, through a few simple accompaniments, matter-of-fact in a suburban New York childhood, I was
not
just a “mix cornbread” girl. I had propers, identity, a culinary genealogy attaching me to my mother, and to her child hood in Norfolk, Virginia. That’s cornbread root magic and mojo in action.

“Don’t you
dare
throw that bowl out!” I told my mother. “It’s odd, what children remember,” she said, bemused. “I never dreamed that old bowl had any significance to you.”

But it did. And she kept it. And one day I’ll be making cornbread in it, this time from scratch, with my very young adopted niece, Zoë, who will make that satisfying crack as she breaks the egg against the side of the rosy-beige bowl.

·M·E·N·U·

A S
UGARING
-O
FF
S
UPPER

Coleslaw with a Tart, Mustardy Vinaigrette

*

Vermont Maple-Sweetened Cornbread

*

Brattleboro Baked Beans Borracho

*

Baked Apples Glazed with Maple Syrup

G
OT TO
D
RAW THE
L
INE
S
OMEWHERE
:
M
ASON
, D
IXON
,
AND
T
HEIR
L
INE

If you’re like most Americans, “Mason-Dixon Line” doesn’t mean what you probably think it does.

First off, Mason and Dixon were two surveyors, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon. And the real, that is to say, original, historical line they surveyed between 1763 and 1767 demarcates the east-west Pennsylvania-Maryland border and that portion of the Maryland-Delaware border running more or less north-south … a much smaller area, and one with a much less pointed meaning, than most of us suppose.

For over time, “Mason-Dixon Line” has taken on a quite different connotation in common parlance. Most nonhistorians use the phrase to describe the border between free states and slave states prior to the Civil War, or once the war broke out, during, and after it, between states on the Union and Confederate sides.

This anecdotal, but not historical, dividing line is generally what is recognized as the Mason-Dixon Line: the border (as it turns out imaginary) separating North from South, and a division (also, as it turns out, imaginary) between the alleged two types of cornbread.