The Cornbread Gospels (3 page)

Say “cornbread,” with open eyes, heart, mouth, and mind, and you will find it is so inextricably bound with so much that is essential to human life that it leads to everything, everywhere. No other single food
that I have come across has remotely this much power.

Cornbread has been good to me. First, every time I make it, I marvel with each bite, astonished yet again by its sheer simple goodness. How could I do otherwise than to share this goodness? People who invite me to potlucks add, “And, oh, would you bring your cornbread?” Innumerable guests at the restaurant I once owned asked, “Will you give me the recipe for this cornbread?” A reader of my cookbooks told me that so deeply enshrined is “my” cornbread as her family’s cornbread that her son called home (to Springfield, Missouri), from college in San Francisco, so she could dictate the recipe to him.

I learned to make “my” cornbread from a once-neighbor some thirty-five years ago. Her name was Viola. She was a soft-voiced Southerner living in New York; her skin was so black it had almost a blue cast to it. Hence the quote marks around “my”: How could such a recipe be mine, any more than it was hers, or that of the person (mother? grandmother?) who taught it to her? No matter who the
me
is, no one person can truly claim a cornbread as “mine.” The recipes, and their main ingredient, go too far back to calculate origin or ownership.

Cornbread belongs to
us
, the human race. And that is the gospel truth.

Now all of this would have been more than privilege enough for me. But this project has given me another gift, which extends into the future.

From now on I will be able to say, “I once wrote a book about cornbread.” And then I will get to see those lit-up smiles, and to listen, once again, as the stories, the recipes, and the intimate, particular, personal tellings of the cornbread gospels unfold.

• • • • • • • • • •

Nowhere in America are people as passionate, proud, and particular about cornbread as in the South. And though Southerners often disagree region to region as to exactly what constitutes good cornbread, they are generally adamant on two points: 1) Yankees just can’t, can
not
, make good cornbread, and 2) their mother/grandmother makes or made the very best cornbread ever. At times Southerners can get downright belligerent. Mark Twain did, (in)famously:
“Perhaps no bread in the world is quite as good as Southern corn bread, and perhaps no bread in the world is quite so bad as the Northern imitation of it.” So much are cornbread and the region intertwined that I don’t know of a single narrative that takes place in the South, fiction or non, in which you
don’t
come across characters eating, making, serving, or referencing cornbread at least once.

Before we go further, in the interest of full disclosure, my vantage point is this: I was born Yankee, but I spent most of my teenage and adult life in the South. Thus, I love many cornbreads, some Southern
and
some Northern. Too, though there are
general
differences between the two (see
pages 34
–
36
), the delicious, contrary cornbread world is filled with exceptions to the rule.

But I can say with certainty that no part of America cares more about cornbread than the South. Cornbread is the South’s daily bread, or at least it was until the recent past. And, though it was everyday fare, it was also part of every important Southern occasion: holidays, church picnics, dinners on the grounds, family reunions—cornbread was always present. (Weddings are the only general exception to this rule, though many a contemporary wedding brunch is graced by a baked casserole of cheese grits or a spoonbread. But other than this, or at weddings during very impoverished times, or at hippie/alternative nuptials, no cornbread.) The ever-present cornbread might be stripped-down and simple, like Truman Capote’s Family’s (
page 13
), Sylvia’s Ozark (
page 18
), or Ronni’s Appalachian (
page 21
); or it might rise to great heights (elaborate, soufflé-like spoonbreads, see
pages 183
–
198
). But look on the table, and in some form, there it is.

That cornbread is associated with celebration, abundance, and family in the South is indisputable. But look at the whole story of Southern cornbread—complex and rich, if at times less sunny—and you see the best and worst of the South’s culture and history. Cornbread in the South speaks of kitchen acumen; the ability to make a great meal from simple ingredients; hospitality, joy, pride, and just plain good eating. But Southern cornbread also tells the story of lack; subsistence in a not-so-very-long-ago time; of stigma, class, race, and shame.

I learned this when, more than twenty-five years ago, I first opened an upscale restaurant in Arkansas with my late husband. The fact that we served, among many other things, cornbread, was a cause of both consternation and
wonderment to some local-born-and-bred Ozark Arkansawyers, to whom cornbread was anything
but
white-tablecloth food.

This astonished me only until I thought, “Well, who among us doesn’t discount the wonders in our own lives because they are common and everyday to
us
?” Still, I was puzzled and intrigued enough to begin digging more deeply into cornbread’s Southern roots. I found a two-sided history, and began to understand a little more.

I hadn’t fully realized, at the time when we proudly, and generally to great acclaim, brought forth our Dairy Hollow House Skillet-Sizzled Cornbread (
page 12
) in the restaurant’s breadbaskets, that while cornbread was traditional much-loved Ozark family fare, it was
also
what you ate when the family had no money. Leftover cornbread was what the poor had for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, what the poor kids brought to school in a lunch pail: a line of demarcation.

“It is constantly surprising, this vegetable snobbism,” wrote M. F. K. Fisher in
The Art of Eating.
“It is almost universal.” But then she went on to describe “… corn meal mush and molasses, a dish synonymous to many Americans with poor trash of the pariah-ridden South.”

How did cornbread become “synonymous” with those Fisher writes off as “trash”? Go back to slavery times, when cornmeal (far cheaper than wheat flour) comprised the bulk of slave rations. According to one former slave, Louis Hughes, it was eaten so continually that slaves called it “Johnny Constant.” (At Christmas, on the Virginia plantation of his childhood, slaves each received a “gift” of a pint of flour, from which they made a biscuit: “Billy Seldom.”)

Frederick Douglass, also born a slave, in Maryland, describes how cornbread was prepared, midday in the field:

The slaves mixed their meal with a little water, to such thickness that a spoon would stand erect in it. After
the wood had burned away to coals and ashes, they would place the dough between oak leaves and lay it carefully … completely covering it; hence, the bread is called ash cake. The surface of this peculiar bread is covered with ashes, to the depth of a sixteenth part of an inch, and the ashes, certainly, do not make it very grateful to the teeth, nor render it very palatable.

This cake, supplemented only by a little pork, salt herring, and whatever vegetables they could grow when not working the fields, was what most slaves lived on. Their heavily cornmeal-centered diet, monotonous no less than nutritionally bereft, contrasted mightily with the light, buttermilk-rich and egg-leavened cornbreads proudly served at the master’s table (invariably prepared by a slave cook). Thus, the roots of cornbread’s double history.

So great and divisive an evil as slavery could not stand in a country whose ideals were formulated on freedom. During the Civil War, cornmeal again played a critical but ambiguous role. Along with and part of the horror of enslavement, the slaves lived with monotony, poor nutrition, and the knowledge that corn was all that kept them from starvation. Though free, the soldiers of the Civil War, especially on the Confederate side, also lived on cornmeal: sometimes made into cornbread, sometimes simply cooked in water as porridge or mush, and sometimes eaten raw. “Johnny Reb fought the Yankees for four years on rations composed mainly of cornbread and beef. There were, to be sure, admixtures now and then of field peas … of flour, pork, potatoes, rice, molasses, coffee, sugar, and fresh vegetables, though it was for the last that the soldiers always suffered most. But (corn) meal … was the staple fare,” wrote Bell Irvin Wiley in
The Life of Johnny Reb: The Common Soldier of the Confederacy.

War and defeat impoverished the South. Postwar reconstruction was a long, slow process. The South, at least certain pockets of it, continued to live close to the bone for a long, long time, even after the ghosts of the Civil War had faded to a whisper elsewhere in the country. When I first moved to the Ozarks, in 1972, a lot of the older natives were still alive. One, who’d been young in the late 1920s, told me that when the Depression hit seventy-some years after the end of the Civil War, “Hell, we didn’t know the difference … we’d
always
been depressed.”