My grandmother’s cornbread was a crisp golden brown. It was cast iron. It was a mason jar of bacon grease kept in the cupboard and a jug of buttermilk in the door of the Frigidaire. It was “home again home again jiggity jog”. It was Lincoln logs. It was sitting at her dining room table looking out the sliding glass door onto the back porch where we cracked walnuts and my brother and I smeared lighting bugs onto the pavement in senseless acts of childhood iridescence. It was torn into pieces into a glass of milk and eaten with a spoon. It was badminton and the smell of birdseed. It was childhood, and it was her.
Until a month or so ago when I finally decided to make it myself, I hadn’t tasted cornbread like hers in fifteen years, really didn’t eat cornbread at all. Didn’t bake it either. It might as well of died along with her when I was fourteen. At least it seemed that way for far too long. I didn’t expect her to die when she did. I wasn’t prepared. I hadn’t taken notes. I didn’t know what they would do with all her preserves, and I wept. There just didn’t seem to be anything to be done about any of it. It was hard, losing her, and for a few weeks I tried to pretend it simply hadn’t happened. She was like a second mother, and it appeared to me like some impossible necromancy to attempt to make that cornbread, so I just never did. Grandmother was dead, and cornbread was over. That was just how it was or so it seemed. Around the time she passed away I was beginning to develop that girlish sort of madness common at that age, and over the course of my adolescence I drifted farther and farther into the self-obsession that is being a teenager, and by the end I’d forgotten about cornbread, fireflies, badminton, and all that.
Cornbread in milk (or buttermilk) is an older southern midnight snack: when the day’s cornbread had become dry it was torn into pieces and soaked in milk and eaten with a spoon. Last month I sat at my dining room table and eagerly crumbled a piece of cornbread into a glass of raw milk for the first time in fifteen years. The taste possessed the same immediacy of memory as a familiar scent. I almost cried. I was effervescent, prattling on in excitement about how “it’s just like…just like”. None of it was gone at all, not her, not cornbread.
Ingredients
- 1 1/4 cup 175 g cornmeal
- 3 Tbsp flour
- 1 tsp salt
- 3/4 tsp baking powder
- 3 Tbsp bacon grease vegetable oil, or shortening
- 2 eggs lightly beaten
- 1 cup 240 g buttermilk
- 1/4 tsp baking soda dissolved in a bit of water
- bacon grease for greasing the pan
Instructions
- Heat oven to 425°. Grease a cast iron skillet with bacon grease and place in the oven while it heats. Mix the first four ingredients in a medium mixing bowl. Cut in the fat with your fingers or two knives, mixing well until you have a sandy texture. Combine the eggs and the buttermilk, add to the dry ingredients, and mix to combine well. Add the baking soda and stir to combine. Pour the mixture into the hot skillet and bake for 20 minutes. Invert onto a plate. I like to serve it upside down with the nice crispy side up like she did.
Notes
Variation
My name is Beth, Elizabeth Evelyn to be exact. A native Tennessean, I was born in the South.
I am the author behind Local Milk Blog.