The Cornbread Gospels Read Free Page B

cornbread, was a cause of both consternation andwonderment to some local-born-and-bred Ozark Arkansawyers, to whom cornbread was anything but white-tablecloth food.
    This astonished me only until I thought, “Well, who among us doesn’t discount the wonders in our own lives because they are common and everyday to us ?” Still, I was puzzled and intrigued enough to begin digging more deeply into cornbread’s Southern roots. I found a two-sided history, and began to understand a little more.
    I hadn’t fully realized, at the time when we proudly, and generally to great acclaim, brought forth our Dairy Hollow House Skillet-Sizzled Cornbread ( page 12 ) in the restaurant’s breadbaskets, that while cornbread was traditional much-loved Ozark family fare, it was also what you ate when the family had no money. Leftover cornbread was what the poor had for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, what the poor kids brought to school in a lunch pail: a line of demarcation.
    “It is constantly surprising, this vegetable snobbism,” wrote M. F. K. Fisher in The Art of Eating. “It is almost universal.” But then she went on to describe “… corn meal mush and molasses, a dish synonymous to many Americans with poor trash of the pariah-ridden South.”
    How did cornbread become “synonymous” with those Fisher writes off as “trash”? Go back to slavery times, when cornmeal (far cheaper than wheat flour) comprised the bulk of slave rations. According to one former slave, Louis Hughes, it was eaten so continually that slaves called it “Johnny Constant.” (At Christmas, on the Virginia plantation of his childhood, slaves each received a “gift” of a pint of flour, from which they made a biscuit: “Billy Seldom.”)
    Frederick Douglass, also born a slave, in Maryland, describes how cornbread was prepared, midday in the field:
    The slaves mixed their meal with a little water, to such thickness that a spoon would stand erect in it. Afterthe wood had burned away to coals and ashes, they would place the dough between oak leaves and lay it carefully … completely covering it; hence, the bread is called ash cake. The surface of this peculiar bread is covered with ashes, to the depth of a sixteenth part of an inch, and the ashes, certainly, do not make it very grateful to the teeth, nor render it very palatable.
    This cake, supplemented only by a little pork, salt herring, and whatever vegetables they could grow when not working the fields, was what most slaves lived on. Their heavily cornmeal-centered diet, monotonous no less than nutritionally bereft, contrasted mightily with the light, buttermilk-rich and egg-leavened cornbreads proudly served at the master’s table (invariably prepared by a slave cook). Thus, the roots of cornbread’s double history.
    “During the terrible winter … we almost run out of cornmeal. Mama liked to say, ‘Now you can do without a lot of things, but a family can’t do without cornmeal. If you run out of meal you don’t have any bread and you don’t have any mush. And you don’t have anything to fry fish in, or squirrels. When the meat runs out, and the taters runs out, the only thing that will keep you going is the cornbread. You can live a long time on bread and collard greens, if you have collard greens. And you can live a long time on bread alone if you have to, despite what the Bible says.’”
    —R OBERT M ORGAN ,
Gap Creek
C ORNBREAD ’ S C ONUNDRUM
    So great and divisive an evil as slavery could not stand in a country whose ideals were formulated on freedom. During the Civil War, cornmeal again played a critical but ambiguous role. Along with and part of the horror of enslavement, the slaves lived with monotony, poor nutrition, and the knowledge that corn was all that kept them from starvation. Though free, the soldiers of the Civil War, especially on the Confederate side, also lived on cornmeal: sometimes made into cornbread, sometimes simply cooked in water as porridge or mush, and