The Cornbread Gospels (10 page)
Read The Cornbread Gospels Online
Authors: Crescent Dragonwagon
Vegetable oil cooking spray
1 cup stone-ground yellow or white cornmeal
½ cup whole wheat pastry flour
½ cup unbleached white flour
2¼ teaspoons baking powder
1 tablespoon sugar, preferably unrefined (see Pantry,
page 356
)
½ teaspoon salt
⅓ cup honey
3 tablespoons butter
3¼ cups milk
2 eggs
Kernels cut from 2 to 3 ears of fresh corn, 1 to 1½ cups (see
Shuck and Jive
)
1.
Preheat the oven to 350°F. Spray a 9-by-11-inch baking pan with oil.
2.
Stir together the cornmeal, flours, baking powder, sugar, and salt in a small bowl to blend well. Set aside.
3.
Gently warm the honey and butter in a medium-size saucepan over medium-low heat until the honey thins slightly and the butter melts. Whisk in the milk, and then the eggs.
4.
Combine the wet and dry mixtures, whisking a few times. Gaze suspiciously at the batter, which will look too thin. Stir in the fresh corn kernels.
5.
Pour the batter into the prepared pan and bake until the top of the cornbread is golden brown and springs back when lightly touched, 45 to 50 minutes. Let cool for at least 30 minutes to give the custard a chance to fully set up before cutting into the cornbread, but do serve it warm.
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
ANKEE
“S
PIDER
” C
ORNBREAD WITH A
C
USTARD
L
AYER
M
AKES
8
WEDGES
Another excellent custard-centered cornbread that combines features of the North and South, and a wholly unique twist on preparation. The twist? A cup of milk is poured
over
the finished batter, resulting in a custard layer just underneath the top crust.
Originally this cornbread was baked in a spider, a footed, long-handled skillet designed to stand in the fireplace just above the coals for hearth baking. But now it’s baked in a preheated skillet. Serve the “spider” bread still warm, but not hot, beside a bowl of stew or paired with an assertive salad.
Vegetable oil cooking spray
⅓ cup unbleached white flour
1½ cups stone-ground yellow cornmeal
¼ cup sugar
1¼ teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
2 eggs
¾ cup buttermilk
2 cups milk
2 to 3 tablespoons butter or mild vegetable oil
1.
Preheat the oven to 350°F. Spray a 10-inch cast-iron skillet with oil, and set aside.
2.
Sift together the dry ingredients into a medium bowl.
3.
Break the eggs into a second medium bowl and whisk them well. Whisk in the buttermilk and 1 cup of the milk. Set aside.
4.
Place the butter or oil in the skillet, and place the skillet over medium heat on top of the stove. As the butter or oil heats, quickly stir the wet ingredients into the dry using as few strokes as possible to combine them. (The batter is wetter than most cornbreads. You might need to whisk it a couple of times to incorporate wet into dry, but don’t overbeat.)
5.
Pour a little of the hot butter or oil from the skillet into the batter, give a stir or two, then pour the batter into the prepared hot skillet. Now, here comes the odd part. Pour the remaining 1 cup milk over the batter, without stirring it in.
6.
Bake the cornbread in the oven until golden brown in spots on the top and quite golden around the edges, 50 minutes to 1 hour. The bread will still seem slightly wetter than most cornbreads, but if you poke a toothpick in the center, it’ll come out clean. Let cool in the pan for at least 20 minutes before cutting, so the custard can set up a little.
“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.
ERMONT
M
APLE
-S
WEETENED
C
ORNBREAD
M
AKES
9
SQUARES
Idyllic childhood summers and early fall days were spent at my Aunt Dot’s farm in southeastern Vermont, where I now live. Maple syrup is part of many meals I associate with the farm. It makes its way into many Vermont cornbreads, too. This version is sweet but not too sweet, tender, and rises high into a bit of a dome in the middle. It’s best hot from the oven with butter and, if you wish, a little extra syrup. Enjoy it with baked beans, also sweetened with a good dollop of maple syrup. And if you like the flavor of cornbread and maple syrup as much as I do, don’t miss the Glazed Maple Cornmeal Rolls on
page 176
.
Vegetable oil cooking spray
1 cup unbleached white flour
1 cup stone-ground yellow cornmeal
1 tablespoon baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
2 eggs
⅓ cup pure maple syrup
⅔ cup milk
⅓ cup butter, melted, or mild vegetable oil
1.
Preheat the oven to 400°F. Spray an 8-inch square pan with oil, and set aside.
2.
Sift together the flour, cornmeal, baking powder, and salt into a medium bowl.
3.
Break the eggs into a smaller bowl, and whisk them well. Whisk in the maple syrup, milk, and melted butter or oil.
4.
Pour the wet ingredients into the dry and combine them quickly, using as few strokes as possible. Scrape the batter into the prepared pan and bake until golden brown, 20 minutes.
·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.
