The Cornbread Gospels Read Free

Texas. Doors to the kitchen of an haute resort in Scottsdale, Arizona. Doors to family reunions, church picnics, and potlucks from Mississippi to Maine, Florida to Washington. Doors to literature, history, ethnobotany, and folk culture. Doors to memories, written and oral: this is the cornbread that Truman Capote grew up eating … this is the cornbread that my grandfather fixed every Sunday, he was the designated cornbread maker … this is the cornbread that my mother was raised on in east Texas and I still think it’s the best I ever ate. Doors that opened other doors.
    And behind almost every door, a recipe.
    How could it be otherwise? No other single food has been the subject of more passionate discussion, on and off the record, than cornbread. Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglass, Henry David Thoreau, and Mark Twain are just a few of those who wrote heatedly about cornbread. No other single food has more purely American historical and cultural connections, from the worship of Mother Corn, the Corn Goddess, by Native Americans, to the survival of the Pilgrims, to the New World’s gradual, then vigorous disputation of the Old World’s smug insistence that maize was fit only for cattle, to its darker history, that of staple food to those once enslaved in this country. No single food native to America has become more essential to the survival of so many different nationalities around the globe.
O UR C ORNBREAD , N OW AND F OREVER , A MEN

    Say “cornbread,” with open eyes, heart, mouth, and mind, and you will find it is so inextricably bound with so much that is essential to human life that it leads to everything, everywhere. No other single foodthat I have come across has remotely this much power.
    Cornbread has been good to me. First, every time I make it, I marvel with each bite, astonished yet again by its sheer simple goodness. How could I do otherwise than to share this goodness? People who invite me to potlucks add, “And, oh, would you bring your cornbread?” Innumerable guests at the restaurant I once owned asked, “Will you give me the recipe for this cornbread?” A reader of my cookbooks told me that so deeply enshrined is “my” cornbread as her family’s cornbread that her son called home (to Springfield, Missouri), from college in San Francisco, so she could dictate the recipe to him.
    I learned to make “my” cornbread from a once-neighbor some thirty-five years ago. Her name was Viola. She was a soft-voiced Southerner living in New York; her skin was so black it had almost a blue cast to it. Hence the quote marks around “my”: How could such a recipe be mine, any more than it was hers, or that of the person (mother? grandmother?) who taught it to her? No matter who the me is, no one person can truly claim a cornbread as “mine.” The recipes, and their main ingredient, go too far back to calculate origin or ownership.
    Cornbread belongs to us , the human race. And that is the gospel truth.
    Now all of this would have been more than privilege enough for me. But this project has given me another gift, which extends into the future.
    From now on I will be able to say, “I once wrote a book about cornbread.” And then I will get to see those lit-up smiles, and to listen, once again, as the stories, the recipes, and the intimate, particular, personal tellings of the cornbread gospels unfold.

    C ORN , S PIRIT , AND S USTENANCE
    Most Native Americans knew one staple grain: corn. Corn-and-creation myths abound, varying from tribe to tribe, but all are underlaid by reverence. For Native Americans, the connection between physical and spiritual worlds lay in the connection between human beings and “Mother Corn.”
    Those who immigrated to America had grown up in a place where wheat was the staple grain. In the New (to them) World, often corn was all that stood between them and starvation, and they were grateful. Yet, this life-saving corn was so very not wheat; the way it