The Cornbread Gospels Read Free Page A

grew, its taste, its cooking properties were all utterly different. Every bite, no matter how delicious and how essential to survival, reminded them of what they had left. So, along with gratitude, the newcomers also felt that cornbread tasted of homesickness.
    But gradually, as newcomers sank their own roots into American soil, as generations of children were born here, the New World became not so new. It became home, and corn became ours. With the expansion and settlement of this continent—from south to north, from north to south, and then from east to west—regional variations in cornbread began to spring up. The preexisting local Native American ways with corn, along with regional climate variations and economies, all shaped and flavored the regional cornbreads baked by these new Americans.
    Thus corn and cornbread, as it had always been for the Native Americans, became the American taste of home.

Chapter 1
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SOUTHERN CORNBREADS
Soul in a Skillet

    Nowhere in America are people as passionate, proud, and particular about cornbread as in the South. And though Southerners often disagree region to region as to exactly what constitutes good cornbread, they are generally adamant on two points: 1) Yankees just can’t, can not , make good cornbread, and 2) their mother/grandmother makes or made the very best cornbread ever. At times Southerners can get downright belligerent. Mark Twain did, (in)famously:“Perhaps no bread in the world is quite as good as Southern corn bread, and perhaps no bread in the world is quite so bad as the Northern imitation of it.” So much are cornbread and the region intertwined that I don’t know of a single narrative that takes place in the South, fiction or non, in which you don’t come across characters eating, making, serving, or referencing cornbread at least once.
    Before we go further, in the interest of full disclosure, my vantage point is this: I was born Yankee, but I spent most of my teenage and adult life in the South. Thus, I love many cornbreads, some Southern and some Northern. Too, though there are general differences between the two (see pages 34 – 36 ), the delicious, contrary cornbread world is filled with exceptions to the rule.
    But I can say with certainty that no part of America cares more about cornbread than the South. Cornbread is the South’s daily bread, or at least it was until the recent past. And, though it was everyday fare, it was also part of every important Southern occasion: holidays, church picnics, dinners on the grounds, family reunions—cornbread was always present. (Weddings are the only general exception to this rule, though many a contemporary wedding brunch is graced by a baked casserole of cheese grits or a spoonbread. But other than this, or at weddings during very impoverished times, or at hippie/alternative nuptials, no cornbread.) The ever-present cornbread might be stripped-down and simple, like Truman Capote’s Family’s ( page 13 ), Sylvia’s Ozark ( page 18 ), or Ronni’s Appalachian ( page 21 ); or it might rise to great heights (elaborate, soufflé-like spoonbreads, see pages 183 – 198 ). But look on the table, and in some form, there it is.
C ELEBRATION , S UBSISTENCE

    That cornbread is associated with celebration, abundance, and family in the South is indisputable. But look at the whole story of Southern cornbread—complex and rich, if at times less sunny—and you see the best and worst of the South’s culture and history. Cornbread in the South speaks of kitchen acumen; the ability to make a great meal from simple ingredients; hospitality, joy, pride, and just plain good eating. But Southern cornbread also tells the story of lack; subsistence in a not-so-very-long-ago time; of stigma, class, race, and shame.
    I learned this when, more than twenty-five years ago, I first opened an upscale restaurant in Arkansas with my late husband. The fact that we served, among many other things,