Read The Cornbread Gospels Online
Authors: Crescent Dragonwagon
The Cornbread Gospels (43 page)
2 cups stone-ground white cornmeal
1 tablespoon sugar
¾ teaspoon baking soda
2 teaspoons hot sauce, such as Tabasco
1 tablespoon finely minced onion
¼ cup ketchup
½ cup pickled jalapeño slices, well drained and finely chopped
1 cup buttermilk
About ¼ cup cold water
Mild vegetable oil, for frying
1.
Combine the cornmeal, sugar, and baking soda in a medium bowl (sift in the baking soda if it’s at all lumpy). Whisk together well.
2.
Whisk together the hot sauce, onion, ketchup, jalapeño, and buttermilk in a separate bowl, beating until frothy.
3.
Add the hot sauce mixture to the flour mixture all at once with a couple of stirs, and then drizzle in the water, a tablespoon or so at a time, until the batter is thick enough to scrape from one teaspoon with another, but not too wet.
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 teaspoonfuls, frying several at a time, not overcrowding the pan. Fry until the balls are golden brown underneath, 45 seconds to 1 minute. Then turn them with a slotted spoon, and continue cooking until the second side is golden, too, 40 to 50 seconds more.
5.
Remove from the skillet, blot well with paper towels, and serve right away.
O
NCE A
P
ONE A
T
IME
Corn pone
is an Anglicization of two Native American words: the Narragansett
suppawn
and the Algonquian
appone.
It is the somewhat bulkier East Coast equivalent of Southwestern tortillas. Cornmeal was mixed with water and salt, making a local staple bread in the areas where the British colonists first decamped, now called New England. Northeastern tribes did also employ the magic of the alkalinizing process called nixtamalization (see
page 355
), but the resulting soaked and hulled kernels, which we call hominy and which in that neck of the woods was called samp, was mostly water-cooked (hot cereal–style), not baked as bread. Pone quickly spread south once the colonists arrived, and it became the primary foodstuff for feeding slaves because corn grew so well and had so abundant a yield, while wheat had to be imported and hence was an expensive luxury food. In
The African-American Kitchen,
Angela Shelf Medearis cites a recipe she identifies as “from a slave narrative.”
Light a fire from whatever brush or twigs there may be. On the greased blade of your hoe, mix meal and water until it is thick enough to fry. Add salt, if you remembered to bring any. Lean the hoe into the fire until the top side of the bread bubbles. Flip it and brown the other side.
Now you know why one of the many names for these flat breads made from cornmeal is hoecakes.
These cornbreads were also known as ash cakes (some Native Americans and slaves baked them directly in the fire’s ashes,
some times wrapped in leaves beforehand, sometimes not). The possible cooking methods for them were many; they were sometimes, if one is to believe the old recipes, baked on a board which was “put … before the fire.”
Easier said than done, according to corn documentarian Betty Fussell, who attempted to recreate such bread from the directions in the 1847
Carolina Housewife
(authored by “A Lady of Charleston”). After a series of unsuccessful tries left her “choked with smoke, front red with heat and back blue with cold and stiff from bending,” Fussell says she had “new respect for [her] ancestral grandmothers.”
If only Fussell had been able to hang out with Phillis, the Senegambian cook of Thomas J. Hazard’s grandfather, whom the younger Hazard described in
The Jonny-Cake Letters I-XII
(1880). Hazard describes how Phillis sifted the cornmeal, scalded it with boiling water, kneaded it in a wooden tray, at last placing the cake on a board and setting it “upright on the hearth before a bright, hard-green-wood fire.” She then used a heart-shaped flatiron to hold the board perpendicular to the fire “until the main part of the cake was sufficiently baked.”
Could this much hassle possibly have been worth it? According to Hazard, yes. For “Such … was the process of making and baking the best article of farinaceous food that was ever partaken of by mortal man.”
Jonnycake, ash cake, hoecake, pone—as my late father used to say, “No matter how you slice it, it’s still baloney.” Let us apply the same logic here: No matter how you bake it, it’s still pone.
Today we get to a far more delicious cornbread far more simply by baking it in an oven instead of using ashes, a hoe, or an open fire. But a look back shows how easy we have it, and breeds respect for those who thrived, and baked, and fed themselves under much harsher conditions.
ONNI
’
S
F
RIED
H
OT
W
ATER
P
AN
C
ORNBREAD
M
AKES ABOUT
12
CORN PONES
(
SERVES
4
TO
6)
This is from my friend Ronni Lundy, who, as I noted on
page 21
, once told me that she could write a cornbread book, too, but it would only be one page long. Come on now, Ronni, with these fried pones, wouldn’t it be at least
two
pages?
Like Ronni’s skillet cornbread, this has a pure, unadulterated goodness. Unlike her cornbread, it does contain some flour—all of 4 teaspoons. No sugar, though. As Ronni explains, “The boiling water steams the meal in the corn pones, giving them a delicious creamy texture but a fresh, popcorn-like taste. They should be eaten while hot, but it’s a good idea to break the first ones open and let the steam escape before taking a bite.”
2 cups stone-ground white cornmeal
1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon unbleached white flour
About 2 cups boiling water
Mild vegetable oil, for frying
1.
Whisk the cornmeal, salt, and flour together in a large heat-proof bowl. Then whisk in the boiling water, mixing completely. Ronni notes, “The 2-cup measure is approximate. Some meal may require more, some a little less. You want the mixture to be thoroughly moistened and firm enough to hold together, but you don’t want it soupy like a batter.”
2.
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 and let the oil heat to 365°F (test with a thermometer, or drop in a bit of pone mixture, which should sizzle immediately and start to brown).
3.
Working in batches, heap a spoonful of the pone mixture into your hand and form it into a cake about 3½ inches long, 2 inches wide, and ¾ inch thick in the middle. The batter will be hot, so you might want to chill your hands in ice water beforehand (be sure to dry them thoroughly because any drops that get in the hot oil can splatter back at you). Carefully lay each pone into the hot oil with your fingers or with a spatula (safer, but messier). Make enough pones to fill the pan without crowding. If the pones touch, they’re likely to fall apart.
4.
Fry until golden on the bottom, 2 to 3 minutes, then flip them over and cook until the other side is golden, 1 minute more. Lift them out of the oil with a slotted spatula and put them on paper towels to drain, blotting well. Repeat with remaining pone mixture.
• • • • • • • • • •
or Why You Should Always Make a Double Batch
Leftover cornbread? Today most people make this once-daily American staple from scratch so rarely (if at all) that when they do, they devour it ravenously and joyfully, down to the last crumb, so that the very idea of cornbread leftovers is sacrilegious, an oxymoron, or both. But listen up. As you ought to know by this stage in our culinary travels, I think being mostly cornbread-less is a sad state of affairs, one I am personally out to change. If you agree, the day will come when you’ll have leftover cornbread … and you will be glad you do.
I am a big proponent of the cook-once-for-several-meals school. Intentional cornbread planned-overs allow you to use time-sparing strategies (which not only gets you better meals on the table more quickly and healthfully than you might imagine possible, but leaves you with a quietly smug, money-in-the-bank, I’m-prepared-for-anything feeling). I hope this chapter gives you many reasons why, if you’re baking one skillet or pan’s worth of cornbread, you might as well make two, in anticipation of its possible rebirths. These reincarnations cover every meal, and just about every course in every meal.
I am an expert on the uses of leftover cornbread. For six of the eighteen years my late husband, Ned, and I owned and ran Dairy Hollow House, our inn in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, we also ran the inn’s restaurant, where cornbread occupied a prominent place in our breadbaskets (it’s the one on
page 12
). It also occupied a prominent place in the hearts of our guests and, indeed, in our own lives and identities. At the restaurant we prided ourselves on never running out of cornbread (freshly baked that evening just before serving time, of course). And if it ever looked like there was the faintest possibility that we might run out—if, let us say, a particular family was in such ecstasies over it that they kept sending their breadbasket back for more, and more—why, cornbread is so quick to put together, I could always whomp another skillet or two’s worth into the oven, and have hot, fresh-baked cornbread out to the guests by the time they had finished their starter and/or salad and were ready for soup and bread.
But this abundance inevitably meant leftovers. What to do with them?
“You’ve got to continue to grow, or you’re just like last night’s cornbread—stale and dry.”
—L
ORETTA
L
YNN
NCE
M
ADE
, T
WICE
B
LESSED
Canny, thrifty, close-to-the-edge people have often made wise and delicious use of leftover breadstuffs, even (sometimes especially) stale breadstuffs. I’ve always admired this spirit, not just because waste bothers me but because it’s a creative and transformative response. Stale bread? Whoosh! French toast! “Use it up, wear it out; make it do, or do without” is a phrase an Arkansas native once quoted to me, and to me, this is an act not just of thrift, but of imagination and invention. And the use of bread, staff of life, sacred in some contexts, might serve as a textbook illustration of the heights to which human beings soar, sometimes just because they have to.
Stale bread is an ingredient in many of the world’s great home–style dishes. Much of Western Europe—Spain, Italy, France—makes glorious soup of little more than bread, garlic, olive oil, and water. Other soups—vegetable or bean or meat or poultry—are thickened by crumbs of stale bread, or are served over or under thick slices of it. Think of fragrant gratinéed onion soup, its hot darkness floating and softening the raft of once-hard cheese-covered bread atop it, or
pappa al pomodoro
, bread-based soup in which tomatoes, olive oil, and other fresh and good things transmute stale to succulent. Then there’s the surprising deliciousness of
panzanella
salad, in which tomatoes and olive oil meet again, along with garlic, sweet onion, and a sparkle of vinegar, to reincarnate days-old bread. Jews the world over transform stale matzo into delectable matzo brei, while Germans, Hungarians, and Czechs all have bread-based dumplings. Indeed every bread-eating culture on our bright spinning globe “extends” expensive ground-meat dishes with bread, uses bread-crumb toppings on casseroles, and makes stuffings or dressings of stale bread, whether it be perfumed with sage and stuffed inside a Thanksgiving turkey or cunningly lodged in a mushroom cap, artichoke half, or tomato.