I grew up eating cornbread that my mother made in a cast iron skillet. When I decided I wanted to help with the cooking, making cornbread was one of the first things Mom taught me how to make. The recipe was simple; a cup of self rising cornmeal, a bit of sugar, an 1/8th teaspoon of baking soda, an egg, a tablespoon of vegetable oil and cup of buttermilk. While you mixed up the ingredients, you heated up the skillet and another tablespoon of oil in the oven. Once the skillet and oil were hot, you poured the batter in the skillet and baked it until it was firm in the middle with crisp brown edges. Finally, you might have to turn the broiler on for a few minutes to brown the top.
It seems like we ate that cornbread about five nights a week and we never got tired of it. Sometimes, we smothered it with stewed tomatoes and bacon. Mostly we just ate it as a piece of bread to go along with our minute steak or pork chops. At the holidays, we used the cornbread to make dressing. I still make that cornbread from time to time and it is always a key part of our holiday meals, but I had long forgotten the story behind it until a recent conversation with my mom.
I had stopped by my mom’s place to hang a picture and she had made shrimp creole for dinner. To go along with the shrimp creole, she made her first batch of cornbread in her new cast iron skillet. She commented that the cornbread was not up to snuff because the buttermilk was too fresh which meant she should have used less baking soda. When I asked why this was, Mom reached back to some of the cooking-science she learned studying Home Economics at Blue Mountain College and explained how the baking soda offsets the sourness of the buttermilk. To get the taste right, the baking soda has to balance with the buttermilk.
Mom went on to explain how her recipe was a variation of the cornbread her mother made. Mamaw would put together the same ingredients that I learned to mix up with a few small differences. First, she added salt and baking powder because she used plain cornmeal. Second, she used bacon drippings instead of vegetable oil. Finally, Mamaw did not use buttermilk. Although they made butter on the farm, there was not enough buttermilk to make cornbread every day, and they made cornbread almost everyday. However, my Papaw milked the cow twice a day. So, there was always plenty of milk to go around. After the milk had spent a couple of days in the refrigerator, Mamaw would set the milk out and let it turn to clabber. Clabber is the soured and clotted milk you get when milk curdles. It is curds and whey. When it turned to clabber, Mamaw used it to make the cornbread.
Mamaw had one more trick up her sleeve. She started her cornbread on the stove top. Once she had a skillet hot with bacon drippings, she would fry up a test cake and taste it to see if it was too sour. If it was, she would add more baking soda and try it again. How much baking soda she needed depended on how sour the clabber had gotten. For Mom’s modern version of this recipe, how much baking soda she needs depends on how fresh the buttermilk is. The fresher it is the less sour it is and the less baking soda is needed. Who needs culinary school when you learned to cook on working farm?
As Mom told the story of her mother making cornbread, I could see Mamaw in the farmhouse kitchen cooking lunch or dinner. It seemed that Mamaw was always in the kitchen getting the next meal ready or getting ready to can or freeze whatever it was we were harvesting from the garden. The work never ended and it was centered on the basics of life. You could not let up. As I imagined Mamaw making the same cornbread that I make for my family today, I was struck by how this simple cornbread is a thread to my family’s past. With that in mind, I am not sure that I will eat that cornbread again without thinking of that connection and giving thanks for the sustenance it has provided generations.
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