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36
MY
ROUSES
EVERYDAY
MARCH | APRIL 2017
the
Barbecue
issue
I
n a country, and world, that seems to
grow ever more contentious and us-
versus-them, is there no common
ground? No place in which we can all rest?
Yes. Cornbread. Everybody loves cornbread.
I know. I spent six years writing a book
about cornbread. When I answered the
question, “What are you working on?”
the response was instant. “Cornbread? I
love
cornbread!” It was not only the words
that were near-universal, it was the tone:
delighted surprise, as if reminded of a pure
pleasure rarely thought of, almost forgotten,
yet greeted as an old, dear friend.
So, yes. Cornbread is a meeting place.
That’s why all of us should have a good
cornbread recipe. It’s so very simple to
make. Given this, and given the near-
universal happiness it gives, why would
you deny yourself that rarest of pleasures,
delighting others?
Because cornbread is also a place of dissent.
Not everybody loves the same kind of
cornbread. Sugar, or not? Bacon fat, or
butter? Yellow cornmeal,or white? Universal
agreement on what makes cornbread love-
worthy does not exist. Disagreement about
cornbread, like so much, is just as common
as love for it.
Most professed cornbread lovers have a
cornbread that is to them the one and only
good, real, true, authentic version, against
which all others are sham. “If God had
meant cornbread to have sugar in it, He’d
have called it cake,” cookbook author/
culinary memoirist Ronni Lundy said
tartly. She’s been saying so for decades
(since the 1980s, when she first wrote about
the subject for
Esquire
). The author of the
recently published
Victuals: An Appalachian
Journey, with Recipes
, Lundy is the latest
in a long line of those throwing down the
cornbread gauntlet, a lineage that includes
Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson,
Frederick Douglass and Mark Twain.
Like many other my-way-is-best beliefs,
cornbread loyalties often lie in our
childhoods, the region where we spent
them, and our race. Mostly, the cornbread
we grew up with is the one to which we give
allegiance and love.
Our rationales follow. Lundy recently told
the
Charlotte Observer
,“…we don’t put sugar
or flour in our cornbread in the mountain
South …those were things we’d have to buy
…be beholdened to someone for. Your daily
bread was things you could grow yourself …
the bread of my … forebears resonates for
me culturally as an act of independence …
an individual’s ability to feed him or herself.”
One cannot help but admire this line of
thinking and self-sufficiency; yet Lundy’s
skillet-baked cornbread contains baking
soda, presumably purchased. The truly
self-reliant cornbreads came earlier. Most
of today’s eaters would not recognize
them as cornbread: these breadstuffs were
unleavened cakes of cornmeal, water, and
salt — no milk, buttermilk, eggs. (These
were often called hoecakes or ashcakes,
because they were baked on the side of a
hoe over the fire, or in the ashes themselves).
When such cakes were made from the
finely ground cornmeal possible only when
the corn to be ground had been alkalized
(as Native Americans did, using ground
clamshells, ash, or chamisa bush, among
many other pH-altering agents), they were
… tortillas. (Since the Native Americans
were here first, and corn is the Americas’
Corn
Bread
fed
by
Crescent Dragonwagon