Rouses MARCH-APRIL_2017_final_m

the Barbecue issue

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

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

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MY ROUSES EVERYDAY MARCH | APRIL 2017