When I first came to Mississippi, I faced college cafeteria lines of steaming fried chicken, fried green tomatoes, fried okra and grits, and I felt very lost. Then, at the very end of the line, on a tiny sliver of a tray, something familiar caught my eye: cornbread.
My mom used to make cornbread to use in her basil turkey stuffing at Thanksgiving. She ground corn and wheat in her grain grinder and mixed them with golden honey and eggs warm from our chicken pen. Brown and crusty on top, soft inside and perfect for soaking up the juices from the turkey broth. Most of it never made it into the stuffing but ended up smothered in butter and more honey as a "pre-dinner" treat.
Despite the similarities between the cornbread of my childhood and the cornbread I discovered in Mississippi, I soon realized that there were some distinct differences, mainly the cast-iron pan. At a restaurant with my new boyfriend, the waiter brought a miniature pan of cornbread, flipped it into the air, caught it and slammed it on our table. He then cut it into wedges and left us to eat it with our fried catfish and coleslaw.
More recently, on a trip to the Farmer's Market at the Jackson fairgrounds, I stopped at a bin of fresh corn. Choosing one at a time, I peeled back the silk to check for yellow, firm rows of corn. They were perfect. The smell brought me back to my childhood home in Montana. Every spring my mom would get restless as the snow started to melt; soon her rototiller would be humming from the garden area. Green peas, beans, tomatoes, melons and cucumbers were her specialty. We attempted to grow corn, too, but the ears never grew much more than 4 inches long.
Perhaps I was swayed by the memories of my childhood, or maybe it was an attempt to connect to my new Southern home. At any rate, whether it was philosophical or not, I bought three ears of corn and called my mom for her classic cornbread recipe. I decided to Southernize it by adding whole corn and buttermilk.
As I assembled the ingredients (and panicked about buttermilk because I had never cooked with it before), I couldn't help but wonder if my endeavors would turn out to be a disaster. I felt the desperation that perhaps the Europeans experienced, when they first arrived in the United States and had to survive by learning how to cook cornmeal into pone bread (the original cornbread). I wouldn't starve if I failed to make a perfect pan of cornbread, but my cook's pride was definitely at stake.
As I mixed the ingredients together, ending with the whole kernel corn, the batter turned a light yellow color. I poured it into the hot oiled pan. The thought occurred to me that even if it didn't turn out right in the oven, I could at least be happy that my dough was aesthetically pleasing.
I pulled the pan out of the oven. It looked pretty good to me, but I knew the true taste test would come from my boyfriend, him being the true Southern boy that he is. I sliced him a piece, steaming hot from the oven. He declared I was on my way to becoming a true Southern cook.
Adding whole kernel corn makes an interesting texture and taste. Also, according to some of the sources I read while searching for recipes, true Southern cornbread doesn't have any honey in it, so if you wanted to be authentic, you could eliminate the honey.
Corn was domesticated from a species called teosinte native to the area between and Oaxaca and Jalisco in Mexico. Unlike many domesticated food crops, corn bears only marginal resemblance to its wild ancestor. In fact, teosinte's kernels are so small and hard that they cannot be eaten, which caused some consternation among botanists because genetic tests showed teosinte had to be corn's ancestor. Why would anyone bother to domesticate a plant they could not even eat? Eventually, scientists proposed that early farmers popped teosinte kernels, just the way we pop corn today. It took those same farmers thousands of years of careful breeding to produce the crop we recognize today.
- Source: Wikipedia
Cornbread Quotes
"The North thinks it knows how to make cornbread, but this is a gross superstition. Perhaps no bread in the world is quite as good as Southern cornbread, and perhaps no bread in the world is quite as bad as the Northern imitation of it."
—Mark Twain
"I don't know what it's like for a book writer or a doctor or a teacher as they work to get established in their jobs. But for a singer, you've got to continue to grow or else you're just like last night's cornbread—stale and dry."
—Loretta Lynn
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