The Cornbread Gospels (42 page)
Read The Cornbread Gospels Online
Authors: Crescent Dragonwagon
HILE
-C
ORN
F
RITTERS
S
ERVES
4
Chile-hot flavors move from Southeast Asia back home to the Southwest. Serve this delish fritter alongside black beans cooked in beer, with salsa or pico de gallo, sliced avocado, and a green salad with cilantro dressing; coffee ice cream with Kahlúa for dessert.
Mild vegetable oil
½ red bell pepper, cored, seeded, and diced
½ yellow bell pepper, cored, seeded, and diced
1 poblano pepper, diced (with seeds for a little heat, without for more mildness)
½ onion, minced
1 tablespoon mild red chile powder
2 cups corn kernels, cut from about 4 ears of fresh corn (see Shuck and Jive,
page 49
)
2 tablespoons vegetable stock, plus extra as needed
¾ cup unbleached white flour
¼ cup yellow or white masa harina (see Pantry,
page 354
)
½ teaspoon baking powder
¼ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon sugar
1 egg
½ cup milk, plus extra as needed
1 tablespoon butter, melted
1.
First, precook the vegetables: Add 1 tablespoon of the vegetable oil to a large skillet and heat over medium-high heat. Add the peppers and onion and sauté, stirring, until the vegetables soften slightly, 3 to 4 minutes. Sprinkle with the chile powder and sauté, stirring, for 1 minute more. Stir in the corn, then scrape the corn mixture into a small bowl to cool. Deglaze the skillet with the 2 tablespoons of vegetable stock and add it, too, to the corn mixture.
2.
Now, prepare the batter. Combine the flour, masa harina, baking powder, salt, and sugar in a large bowl, stirring all together well. Mix together the egg, milk, and butter in a separate bowl. Blend the egg mixture into the flour mixture with a few strokes, then stir in the vegetable mixture until it is just combined and the flour is thoroughly moistened; add a tablespoon or 2 more milk or vegetable stock if needed to achieve this.
3.
Pour vegetable oil into the skillet to reach a depth of ½ inch. Place the skillet over medium-high heat. When the oil is hot enough to fry in (365°F on thermometer, or test with a little drop of batter, which should sizzle immediately and start to brown), drop the batter in by tablespoonfuls. Don’t overfill the skillet; no more than 4 to 6 fritters at a time, and they shouldn’t touch. Lower the heat slightly and cook the fritters until golden brown, about 3 minutes on the first side and slightly less for the second side. Drain well on paper towels and serve, hot or at room temperature.
C
ORN
F
RITTER
S
TORY
#2
At age nineteen, I worked for a season at the kitchen of the Crescent (no relation) Hotel, a venerable if unlikely castle of stone built in the 1880s atop East Mountain in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. In those days, before its restoration, the hotel catered to bus tours: We might have fifty people walk in at one time for lunch, sometimes without reservations. We fed them at a buffet line, and developed strategies to keep pretty good food fresh and hot and coming out, no matter what.
One of the best pull-it-out-of-a-hat dishes for the buffet line was corn fritters. We had a huge commercial griddle. I’d skim it with oil, get it very hot, and throw together essentially a pancake batter with a lot of thawed frozen corn tossed in. I’d ladle out row upon row of evenly spaced fritters, and by the time I ladled out the last, the first would be ready to be flipped over. By the time they were all turned, I was ready to go back to the first, blot them with paper towels, and take them out to the buffet. I must have done forty or fifty at a time, maybe more. They were cute little things, tasty and well received.
One day I was transferring a fresh batch from tray to buffet table when a just-past-middle-aged lady, on a bus tour from I think Ohio, asked me, “Excuse me, dear, but what are those?”
“Corn fritters, m’am,” I replied (having lived in the South long enough to have my m’ams down pat). “Freshly made.”
“Oh, how
nice
!” exclaimed the lady. With an expression of wonderment she turned to her husband and said, “Look, Henry,
corn critters
!”
ASIC
D
OWN
-H
OME
H
USH
P
UPPIES
M
AKES
15
TO
20 (
SERVES
4
TO
5)
This is the traditional hush puppy, the one most people who grew up eating hush puppies recall happily. Some grandmas grated the onion, some minced it; some, these days, pulse-chop it in the processor. Some wouldn’t think of eating hush puppies without ketchup, while others enjoy them sprinkled with a bit of coarse salt and malt vinegar (à la British fish-and-chips). Still others are partisans of butter and honey—yes, even with the onions.
1⅔ cups stone-ground cornmeal, preferably white
¼ cup unbleached white flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon baking soda
½ to 1½ teaspoons sugar
½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper (optional, but good)
2 eggs
1 cup buttermilk
½ medium onion, very finely minced Mild vegetable oil, for frying
1.
If you don’t intend to serve the hush puppies virtually straight from the stove, preheat the oven to 200°F.
2.
Combine the dry ingredients thoroughly in a medium bowl.
3.
Beat together the eggs and buttermilk in a small bowl. Stir this into the dry ingredients to make a batter thick enough to mound on the end of a teaspoon. Stir in the onion. As is almost always the case with cornbreads, don’t overbeat the batter or you’ll toughen the hush puppies.
4.
Pour the oil into a large skillet to reach a depth of 1 to 1½ inches, depending on the depth of your skillet. Place the skillet over medium-high heat. When the oil is hot enough to fry in (365°F on a thermometer, or test with a drop of batter, which should sizzle immediately and start to brown), drop the batter in by small rounded teaspoonfuls, using a second teaspoon to scrape off the batter into the fat. Working in batches, fry 5 or 6 hush puppies at a time, making sure not to overcrowd the skillet. Fry until the balls are golden brown on their underneath sides, 45 seconds to 1
minute. Then turn them with a slotted spoon and continue cooking until the other side is nice and golden, too, 30 to 40 seconds more.
5.
Either transfer to a serving dish, blot with paper towels, and serve posthaste, or line a baking sheet with paper towels (or, traditionally, torn-open brown paper grocery sacks) and scoop the finished hush puppies from the fat onto the paper-lined sheet. Transfer them to the preheated oven to keep them warm, and begin frying the next batch.
ARIATIONS
:
S
WEET
M
ILK
H
USH
P
UPPIES
A milk batter has slightly less tang and tenderness than one made with buttermilk. Use milk to replace the buttermilk, omit the baking soda, and use 1 level tablespoon of baking powder to leaven the batter.
EXAS
H
USH
P
UPPIES
Use stone-ground yellow cornmeal instead of white. Add a teaspoon of garlic powder or (infinitely better in my view) 3 or 4 pressed garlic cloves. Omit the black pepper, but add 1 to 2 finely minced fresh or pickled jalapeño peppers (leaving in the seeds, if you wish, for extra kick). If you like, add a little minced parsley or cilantro. And—I am told this is the secret—fry the hush puppies in the same oil used for frying the fish you’re serving them with.
UICKIE
G
ARDEN
H
USH
P
UPPIES
Substitute 2 cups minus 2 tablespoons of self-rising cornmeal (White Lily is the preferred brand) for the flour, cornmeal, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Use milk or water in place of the buttermilk, adding a few tablespoons of finely minced tomatoes to the liquid, to equal the 1 cup total. Use 2 or 3 finely chopped scallions instead of the regular onion.
P
EDIGREED
H
USH
P
UPPIES
As history has it, the little rounds of fried cornbread now known as hush puppies originated southwest of Tallahassee, Florida, in the fishing village of Apalachicola (the bay of which is famed for its oysters). The tale (tail?) goes that a dough made up with what was at hand (including the seasoned cornmeal-flour mix in which the just-caught fish had been breaded) was tossed in a skillet full of fat over the campfire, fried, and then tossed to the yapping dogs to quiet them. Hence the name. Although this explanation is only a little more plausible than the legend behind anadama bread (see
page 165
), hush puppies are now an accepted accompaniment to fried fish all over the South, and are also popular at barbecues.
The moistening liquid in the batter is most commonly buttermilk. But it’s often swapped out for other, sometimes surprising, agents, such as beer, ketchup, tomato juice, sweet milk, or salsa—any or all of which may be mixed with a little mayonnaise. And, as America’s taste for all things
caliente
has increased, jalapeños and other green chiles, cayenne and Tabasco or similar hot sauces, garlic, and ever more freshly ground black pepper have found their way into the hush puppies. Onions, finely chopped, are almost universally used in hush puppies, but they may be scallions, especially the green part (especially in Louisiana); yellow onions (most common); red onions (occasionally); or even onion powder (not in my kitchen, ever, however).
And back in apocryphal Apalachicola? It hosts an annual Florida Seafood Festival, at which hundreds of pounds of mullet, shrimp, oysters, scallops, and other fish and seafood are fried in enormous vats—right alongside the hush puppies.
OUTH
L
OUISIANA
–S
TYLE
H
USH
P
UPPIES
M
AKES
12
TO
15 (
SERVES
4
TO
5)
This repeats several of the elements of the Basic Down-Home Hush Puppies (
page 247
) but combines them in a method just different enough to warrant its own recipe. If you’ve done any Cajun cooking, you’ll recognize the trinity of onion, celery, and green bell pepper that is a backbone of this region’s cuisine, but any native will tell you it’s the green onion tops that make this distinctly South Louisianan. You’ll find some variation on this theme in every community cookbook of the area.
1 cup stone-ground cornmeal, preferably yellow
1 teaspoon baking powder
¾ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon sugar
1 cup unbleached white flour
1 egg
¾ cup milk
⅛ teaspoon cayenne pepper
¼ to ½ cup finely chopped scallions, green tops only
1 tablespoon grated white onion
1 tablespoon very finely minced celery
1 tablespoon very finely minced green bell pepper
2 teaspoons very finely minced fresh flat-leaf parsley
Mild vegetable oil, for frying
1.
Sift the cornmeal, baking powder, salt, sugar, and flour into a large bowl.
2.
Separately, beat the egg and milk together in a small bowl, and add this to the cornmeal mixture, stirring until just combined. With a few more stirs add, all at once, the cayenne, scallions, white onion, celery, green pepper, and parsley, stirring until just blended.
3.
Pour the oil into a large skillet to reach a depth of 1 to 1½ inches, depending on the depth of your skillet. Place the skillet over medium-high heat. When the oil is hot enough to fry in (365°F on a thermometer, or test with a drop of batter, which should sizzle immediately and start to brown), drop the batter in by rounded teaspoonfuls, using a second teaspoon to scrape off the batter into the fat. Fry 5 or 6 hush puppies at a time, but don’t overcrowd the pan. Work in batches. Fry until the balls are golden brown underneath, 45 seconds to 1 minute. Turn them with a slotted spoon and continue cooking until the second side is also golden, in 40 to 50 seconds more.
4.
Remove the puppies from the skillet, blot well with paper towels, and serve as soon as possible.
OWLIN
’ H
USH
P
UPPIES
M
AKES
15
TO
18 (
SERVES
5
TO
6)
At the National Cornbread Festival, held annually in South Pittsburg, Tennessee, you can taste a plateful of different cornbreads at Cornbread Alley, each type made by a different local church, youth group, or nonprofit organization. When I saw these at the festival in 2003, I didn’t expect to like them—
ketchup
in the batter?—but I did. In fact, they are probably my favorite hush puppies. Here’s my version.