Cornbread: For Body and Soul

Today I received a card from a friend in DC. I was reminded of our conversations about cornbread.How can cornbread be a topic of conversation? Probably because we had hot cornbread on our supper table every week-day of my life, but usually biscuits on Sunday, as I remember. Mother made cornbread perfect of course, lots of bacon grease smoking hot, which made a good crust and her cornbread was thin like Daddy liked it. I remember making it a few times and Daddy complained it was "like cake", too thick and no crust. I still make it from scratch and it's never perfect, but always pretty good.

At night, we didn't have snack food like kids have today, but leftover cornbread and milk was a wonderful treat-if we had any leftover cornbread, and if we had enough "sweet" milk. Some families liked butter-milk and cornbread; we loved sweet-milk (regular whole milk) and cornbread. We knew better than to drink all the milk since Daddy expected milk in the thermos of coffee he took underground each day. One of my two brothers credits lack of milk for his shorter stature. He always smiles, though. Mother wouldn't hesitate waking us at 4:30 AM to go borrow milk from a neighbor, if there wasn't enough left for Daddy. This was a difficult charge with 6-8 children, who loved milk, living there most of the time and was a "whippin" offense. As selfish as it may seem to today's children, our father deserved the best since he labored miles under the mountain, in 36" height coal, so he burned way more calories than we did. Every day though, Daddy brought at least 1/2 of his "lunch cake" back home to those of us young ones who were eagerly waiting to open his bucket.I'm sure every child of Southern Appalachia has a cornbread story--and, I guess, a lunchbox story.

My D.C. friend, for example, is a life-long friend who has lived in D.C. since his graduation from Berea College in 1963. He grew up in Letcher County and had a life, similar to mine, but he lived in town.One of his earliest and best memories, he has often told me, was dropping by the local hotel where his mother was the cook. She would give him cornbread and milk. He was able to spend some precious time sitting on a little stool, in the hotel kitchen, eating cornbread, and being with his mother. As I listened to him over the years, this story always stood out as very significant in his childhood memories of his mother, who, sadly, died young.

I never heard of sugar in cornbread until much later in life when I'd visit restaurants who used sugar and the bread tasted more like dessert. We just roughed it with corn meal, a little flour, salt, baking powder and grease. The cornbread was better or worse depending on whether Mother had salt bacon to fry for the grease. She fried the bacon and left the grease to get smoking hot in the same black skillet in which she baked the cornbread. Daddy, of course, was treated to all the salt-bacon in a little plate set out just for him. Many times, it was the only meat on the table--thank goodness the children didn't like it.

Another time, I'll write about my baby brother, now an organic farmer in East Kentucky. He plants corn with seeds "brought forth from 1823" and grinds the corn on a stone mill in an old barn. His Wiley Branch cornbread is coarse and the best in the world. He gives most of it away to family and neighbors.

Sometimes, when I visit my daughter, or my sisters back home, I am most pleased to find leftover cornbread on the stove or a hot pone just taken out of the oven.

Cornbread memories are welcome here,

Peace,
Judy