Cornbread Lovers of the World: Unite!
The international network for all things cornbread - recipes, tales, history, how-to's, why's and wherefore's
Hot from the oven: the latest major & minor cornbread news & goings-on
June 10, 2009 Adventures in 'locally-sourced' cornbread Fresh, regional, local... these are the watchwords of most American food lovers. Read a Shenandoah Valley home-schooling mom's take on same --- including a cornbread pictorial.
May 31, 2009 give that man another piece! Grandmothers and cornbread just go together. We all know it. But this particularly well-written reminiscence by chef Robert St. John. who is from Mississippi, PROVES it! Unlike most such pieces, it carries cheerfully into the present and is entirely without mournful elegiac air. No recipe, but well-worth reading.
May 31, 2009 another convert to crumbling Scroll down through some nice garden pictures (and one of Shiro's beloved dog and you'll come to a post on baking and cornbread. She mentions that in reading The Cornbread Gospels she came across the fact that "... many Southerners will crumble cornbread and pour milk over it for breakfast, sort of like cereal." (Obviously no surprise to most readers here.) She continues, "Since the bread I had was Southern-style, I tried it out, and it was delicious. This has officially supplanted breakfast cereals for me." Emphasis ours! Oh, yeah!
May 30, 2009 Say it ain't so department: It might be good, but could you possibly call a recipe which "combines the delectable bite of banana bread with the grain of cornbread" cornbread? But there it is, Banana Pecan Cornbread, proceeded by this cryptic note: "The affixing of the pecan foolish adds an fresh screw to the flavor in this appetizing banana bread."
May 30, 2009 Cornbread is right neighborly :Good fences may make good neighbors... but good neighbors make good cornbread, as this short and sweet opinion piece makes clear.
May 30, 2009 Basic is in the skillet of the be-cooker :
Another recipe for "basic" cornbread from Chow. The poster, an Aida Mollenkamp, notes "As classic and simple as it comes, cornbread is most often a vehicle for dipping or slathering—but should still be tasty and moist in its own right." Well, yes, no, and maybe. Some, of course, would argue that cornbread should not be moist but, especially when used for dipping or crumbling, dry. Some would also say that a "basic" should never, but never, contain flour. Three eggs? Some would say that's company cornbread, not "basic." These are not quibbles, merely a look at how clearly the kind of cornbread you make, eat, love, and yes, call "basic" is a cultural lingua franca.
May 9, 2009 Another cornbread convert : Every time someone discovers REAL cornbread, I feel like it is a victory for love, truth, light and that good has triumphed over evil. Take a look at Lori's sizzling adventures...
May 8, 2009 Bayou Boogie What makes this Cajun Cornbread and not regular embellished jalapeno cornbread? We're guessing the fact it contains cayenne as well as jalousie, is baked in a skillet, and has several of the other well-known tropes of the South: no sugar, no flour. But good lord, what a LOT of oil! Bet it's rich as sin. Any I Love Cornbreaders want to try it and report here?
May 7, 2009 Close Encounters of the cornbread kind: Okay, this isn't "news" in the current events sense, but it;s news to us. Quick: what small mid-American city has a street named after our favorite breadstuff? Answer: Muncie, Indiana boasts, yes, a Cornbread Road. And what movie featured an alien abduction which takes place on that road? Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the 1977 Steven Spielberg film. One of the main characters, Roy Neary (played by Richard Dreyfuss) lives in Muncie, Indiana. Though not filmed on location in the actual Muncie, the movie makes many references to the town. Most germane to our obsession: Muncie's Cornbread Road is where Neary has his "close encounter" and his obsession really kicks into high gear. What we think: if there had been actual cornbread, instead of a mere street name, Neary / Dreyfuss would have no interest in another world... not with cornbread in this one.
May 7, 2009 Another Mother's Day cornbread story: This one from the Charleston Daily Mail gives more than a quick mention of cornbread. It's built, heart, soul, and skillet around the author's mother's cornbread and is a beautiful tribute. It includes a recipe, too.
May 6, 2009 Another Depression-era cornbread-containing reminiscence: this one is just in time for Mother's Day. It's from a little paper in Cassville, Missouri, in the Ozarks. Amazing how often mothers, the Depression, cornbread, and surviving well despite hard times in Southern America come together, isn't it?
May 5, 2009 Why, when it comes to cornbread, you just really have to be there... or maybe not: Bless her heart, the author of Love in the Kitchen is a young Asian wife and mother, living in the Netherlands. She's clearly writing in English as a second or third language, and trying to get American cornbread. The kind of grammatical and spelling errors that are hilarious on, say, directions for assembling something made in China come across here as quite sweet and touching. So does the rather wild cornbread recipe from "a Malaysian chef."(Why?) But as she says, "even it doesn't look as nice as the best but I make it with my love, care and full with my hart!"
May 6, 2009 "A slice of cornbread a day makes you healthy, wealthy, and wise" ?: Maybe not, but you wouldn't know it from A Southern Grace, a terrific blog by a young woman who is "American by birth, Southern by the grace of God," but now finds herself living in ... upstate New York. Not sure how her delightful reminising and properly opinionated post on true Southern cornbread (skillet/no flour/no sugar --- where have you heard this before?) in April 2 escaped our notice, but here it is now, complete with recipe. Since Grace is only 26, but her "grandpa has eaten a piece of cornbread with his lunch every single day for as long as I've known him" and her "grandma can make with her eyes closed and one hand tied behind her back" , those of us who consider ourselves cornbread elders and worry (when we don't have anything better to do) about the old roots dying out, it's very reassuring. On the other hand: she does use self-rising cornmeal. You've been warned, y'all.
May 3, 2009 "All corn bread (sic) is not created equal."
You already knew that, we're sure, but here's the Tennessean's take on it. They do, however, commit the cardinal sin of spelling cornbread as two words. No, no! Four recipes are included: three from The Cornbread Gospels (by "I Love Cornbread"'s own Crescent Dragonwagon) and one from The Lee Brothers Southern Cookbook. The Lee Brothers, by the way, run a splendid specialty Southern food company, built around that other regional indelicate delicacy, boiled peanuts.
October 23, 2008 CORNBREAD AS POTENTIAL MARITAL "DYNAMITE"? . All of on this site may know that "sugar in cornbread" are often fighting words. But in a charming article in the Orange County Register , Food Editor Cathy Thomas reflects on the subject in her parents' life, as "an argument that spanned the length of their 60-year marriage." Funny and moving...
October 22 " A CORNBREAD RECIPE RIFFS OFF AFRICAN INGREDIENTS IN A NOD TO OBAMA'S HERITAGE", says the L.A. Times... to which, we, reading said recipe, went "Hunnnh?" There's reaching and then there's really reaching and then there's over-reaching. Said cornbread (yeast-risen, with southwestern spicings) contains not one single African ingredient! It is, however, from a book by a fine chef, Marcus Samuelsson, whose background and ethnicity is about as melting-pot as Obama's: Samuelson is black, born in Ethiopia, raised in Scandinavia, made his fame and fortune in New York at the high-style restaurant Aquavit. His book is "The Soul of a New Cuisine: A Discovery of the Foods and Flavors of Africa" and it's gotten good reviews and lots of attention --- in part, no doubt, because it has an introduction written by Desmond Tutu! But the fact remains: truly African cornbread would be foofoo (sometimes called ugali or ampesi), essentially a very thick polenta, not bread as such at all, and the corn meal in it is a New World food in its origins, not an African one.
October 17 " WE ATE CORNBREAD THREE TIMES A DAY" : Get ready: articles and stories telling us to get ready for the next depression, and how, by harking back to the last Depression are on the way, complete with interviews of those who survived it.... and, sure as God made little green apples, count on many of them mentioning cornbread. Here's one example, from Springfield, Missouri's ABC radio affiliate, KSPR. Raymond Daniels --- the story doesn't give his age but says he "remembers the Thirties vividly" --- recalls hunting rabbits for money to pay the taxes, and, of course, eating the one food that is an antidote not only to hunger but to both small- and large-D depression.
July 16 CORNBREAD IN CHINA??? Yes, according to the profile of a self-sufficient couple in their seventies, who live in Hebei Province. The story appeared on ABC News Crescent is now officially gnashing her teeth because the chapter on Global Cornbreads in The Cornbread Gospels doesn't have a recipe for wo tou.
July 11 CRACKERS INSTEAD OF CORNBREAD? NOW THAT'S POOR: Even crime pays less than it used to. To cut $200,000 from the jail budget in Polk County, Florida, the inmate's diets have taken a drastic turn for the worse... so drastic that two area newspapers and three local television stations covered it. One slice of bread at breakfast, not two. No juice, fresh milk (powdered is being substituted), chocolate milk, coffee. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are being cut from the menu (to be replaced with what, one wonders?). No more fresh eggs; just "frozen egg patties." And, yes, crackers instead of cornbread. "This is jail, it's not Bern's Steakhouse," sheriff Gray Judd reportedly told inmates. No kidding.
July 10 CORNBREAD,SWAMP CABBAGE & HARD TIMES 'AT THE GATEWAY TO THE OKEFENOKE': The Charlton County Herald, Folkston, Georgia (right near the Florida border, recently interviewed a number of elders who lived through the Depression. Mrs. McCormack, age 87, left school in the fourth grade to go to work and earn much-needed cash. “It was bad I reckon, " she told the paper, " but we knew how to work hard back then. It was tough times, tough times.” She recalls meals of “swamp cabbage” and cornbread. “Mama would go out and cut down a big, old palmetto. She’d get the big old root, wash it, put seasoning in it and cook it down. We wouldn’t be hungry then.” What, we wonder, does 'swamp cabbage' taste like? Is it related to what we now call 'hearts of palm'? Social nomenclature really changes how we see and taste, and what we pay for it: as witness grits or polenta. Here's the article.
June 26 WELCOME SANITY IN THE SUGAR DEBATE: In the blog Kitchen Mysteries, Raquel writes, describes some of the differing points of view, the ingredients in her version, and adds that :"depending on what I am eating it with" (she likes it) " sweet or not." What a concept! Instead of right or wrong, Southern or Northern, the accompanying food dictates the sweetness! "With beans, I prefer not sweet," she writes. "With anything else, I like it a little sweet." No doubt this will not satisfy die-hards from either camp, but takes it from ideology to cuisine... to the category of, "What goes better here, red wine or white? Lighter or heavier? Crisp and dry, or fruity or complex?" A tiny revelation of both excellence and tolerance. Sadly, however, she disses "crumblins" (see May 14 news).
June 25 A CORNBREAD CAKE WITH BACON & APRICOTS?: Sounds totally wild, and not at all what most of us would call cornbread, but the recipe for Le Pigeon's Cornbread Cake and the remarkable description by blogger rédacteur en chef du jour on his The Chocolate of Meats are pretty ... intriguing, maybe even seductive. And, since the blog's subtitle is "Taste Matters for the Urban Epicurean", maybe we can forgive him for not getting the mojo of real cornbread. BTW, while Southerners will be outraged by the sugar (and maple syrup!) in this buttery cake, they'll probably feel right at home with the bacon. But, in dessert? Le Pigeon, by the way, is a restaurant in Portland, Oregon. Why does this not surprise us? bacon.
June 16 "SOUTHERN" CORNBREAD RECIPES ON THE NET?:Just came across this page venting on the recipes which purport to be real Southern cornbread and are all over the Internet. Check out bad cornbread and see if you agree.
May 17 CORNBREAD -- WITH OR WITHOUT BUTTERMILK --- IN JAPAN? : You've got to check this article out, from Delta Farm News. It's part cornbread family memoir, part commodities market report.
May 14 DO YOU CALL IT "CRUMBLINS", OR "CRUMBLED-INS"? : Your cornbread and milk, that is? In either case, you'll love this article, full of citations, context, anecdotes, and favorite cornbread-and0milk eaters. It's by Barry Popik, who is an editor of the Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink and is recognized as an expert on the origins of food terms like the Big Apple, and hot dog.
NATIONAL CORNBREAD FESTIVAL, SOUTH PITTSBURG, TENNESSEE, LAST WEEKEND IN APRIL
Every April, it's time for the annual National Cornbread Festival in tiny South Pittsburg, Tennessee (which is also, not coincidentally, home to Lodge Manufacturing, where the only present-day made-in-American cast-iron skillets and other cookware are forged). Lodge, along with Martha White (the South's most widely distributed cornmeal), are sponsors of the community-wide Festival. And what a community it is: cheerful, welcoming, proud of itself without being show-offy... small-town America and the American South community at its best.
2009 marked the Festival's 13th year, and as always, along with such time-honored fair standards as music, a ferris wheel, booths, there are many, many cornbreads to sample. , each more delicious than the last. I Love Cornbread's own Crescent Dragonwagon sadly missed it this year ... she's been twice, in 2003 and 2008, is determined, "as God is my witness" in the words of Scarlett O'Hara, to be back in 2010! Maybe we "I Love Cornbread!" members could plan a meet-up...
Cornbread-lovers should for sure not miss Cornbread Alley, where a dozen or so local charities and non-profits fund raise deliciously, each strutting their stuff with a different cornbread. The beverage of choice? Buttermilk, of course!
May 31, 2009 give that man another piece! Grandmothers and cornbread just go together. We all know it. But this particularly well-written reminiscence by chef Robert St. John. who is from Mississippi, PROVES it! Unlike most such pieces, it carries cheerfully into the present and is entirely without mournful elegiac air. No recipe, but well-worth reading.
May 31, 2009 another convert to crumbling Scroll down through some nice garden pictures (and one of Shiro's beloved dog and you'll come to a post on baking and cornbread. She mentions that in reading The Cornbread Gospels she came across the fact that "... many Southerners will crumble cornbread and pour milk over it for breakfast, sort of like cereal." (Obviously no surprise to most readers here.) She continues, "Since the bread I had was Southern-style, I tried it out, and it was delicious. This has officially supplanted breakfast cereals for me." Emphasis ours! Oh, yeah!
May 30, 2009 Say it ain't so department: It might be good, but could you possibly call a recipe which "combines the delectable bite of banana bread with the grain of cornbread" cornbread? But there it is, Banana Pecan Cornbread, proceeded by this cryptic note: "The affixing of the pecan foolish adds an fresh screw to the flavor in this appetizing banana bread."
May 30, 2009 Cornbread is right neighborly :Good fences may make good neighbors... but good neighbors make good cornbread, as this short and sweet opinion piece makes clear.
May 30, 2009 Basic is in the skillet of the be-cooker :
Another recipe for "basic" cornbread from Chow. The poster, an Aida Mollenkamp, notes "As classic and simple as it comes, cornbread is most often a vehicle for dipping or slathering—but should still be tasty and moist in its own right." Well, yes, no, and maybe. Some, of course, would argue that cornbread should not be moist but, especially when used for dipping or crumbling, dry. Some would also say that a "basic" should never, but never, contain flour. Three eggs? Some would say that's company cornbread, not "basic." These are not quibbles, merely a look at how clearly the kind of cornbread you make, eat, love, and yes, call "basic" is a cultural lingua franca.
May 9, 2009 Another cornbread convert : Every time someone discovers REAL cornbread, I feel like it is a victory for love, truth, light and that good has triumphed over evil. Take a look at Lori's sizzling adventures...
May 8, 2009 Bayou Boogie What makes this Cajun Cornbread and not regular embellished jalapeno cornbread? We're guessing the fact it contains cayenne as well as jalousie, is baked in a skillet, and has several of the other well-known tropes of the South: no sugar, no flour. But good lord, what a LOT of oil! Bet it's rich as sin. Any I Love Cornbreaders want to try it and report here?
May 7, 2009 Close Encounters of the cornbread kind: Okay, this isn't "news" in the current events sense, but it;s news to us. Quick: what small mid-American city has a street named after our favorite breadstuff? Answer: Muncie, Indiana boasts, yes, a Cornbread Road. And what movie featured an alien abduction which takes place on that road? Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the 1977 Steven Spielberg film. One of the main characters, Roy Neary (played by Richard Dreyfuss) lives in Muncie, Indiana. Though not filmed on location in the actual Muncie, the movie makes many references to the town. Most germane to our obsession: Muncie's Cornbread Road is where Neary has his "close encounter" and his obsession really kicks into high gear. What we think: if there had been actual cornbread, instead of a mere street name, Neary / Dreyfuss would have no interest in another world... not with cornbread in this one.
May 7, 2009 Another Mother's Day cornbread story: This one from the Charleston Daily Mail gives more than a quick mention of cornbread. It's built, heart, soul, and skillet around the author's mother's cornbread and is a beautiful tribute. It includes a recipe, too.
May 6, 2009 Another Depression-era cornbread-containing reminiscence: this one is just in time for Mother's Day. It's from a little paper in Cassville, Missouri, in the Ozarks. Amazing how often mothers, the Depression, cornbread, and surviving well despite hard times in Southern America come together, isn't it?
May 5, 2009 Why, when it comes to cornbread, you just really have to be there... or maybe not: Bless her heart, the author of Love in the Kitchen is a young Asian wife and mother, living in the Netherlands. She's clearly writing in English as a second or third language, and trying to get American cornbread. The kind of grammatical and spelling errors that are hilarious on, say, directions for assembling something made in China come across here as quite sweet and touching. So does the rather wild cornbread recipe from "a Malaysian chef."(Why?) But as she says, "even it doesn't look as nice as the best but I make it with my love, care and full with my hart!"
May 6, 2009 "A slice of cornbread a day makes you healthy, wealthy, and wise" ?: Maybe not, but you wouldn't know it from A Southern Grace, a terrific blog by a young woman who is "American by birth, Southern by the grace of God," but now finds herself living in ... upstate New York. Not sure how her delightful reminising and properly opinionated post on true Southern cornbread (skillet/no flour/no sugar --- where have you heard this before?) in April 2 escaped our notice, but here it is now, complete with recipe. Since Grace is only 26, but her "grandpa has eaten a piece of cornbread with his lunch every single day for as long as I've known him" and her "grandma can make with her eyes closed and one hand tied behind her back" , those of us who consider ourselves cornbread elders and worry (when we don't have anything better to do) about the old roots dying out, it's very reassuring. On the other hand: she does use self-rising cornmeal. You've been warned, y'all.
May 3, 2009 "All corn bread (sic) is not created equal."
You already knew that, we're sure, but here's the Tennessean's take on it. They do, however, commit the cardinal sin of spelling cornbread as two words. No, no! Four recipes are included: three from The Cornbread Gospels (by "I Love Cornbread"'s own Crescent Dragonwagon) and one from The Lee Brothers Southern Cookbook. The Lee Brothers, by the way, run a splendid specialty Southern food company, built around that other regional indelicate delicacy, boiled peanuts.
October 23, 2008 CORNBREAD AS POTENTIAL MARITAL "DYNAMITE"? . All of on this site may know that "sugar in cornbread" are often fighting words. But in a charming article in the Orange County Register , Food Editor Cathy Thomas reflects on the subject in her parents' life, as "an argument that spanned the length of their 60-year marriage." Funny and moving...
October 22 " A CORNBREAD RECIPE RIFFS OFF AFRICAN INGREDIENTS IN A NOD TO OBAMA'S HERITAGE", says the L.A. Times... to which, we, reading said recipe, went "Hunnnh?" There's reaching and then there's really reaching and then there's over-reaching. Said cornbread (yeast-risen, with southwestern spicings) contains not one single African ingredient! It is, however, from a book by a fine chef, Marcus Samuelsson, whose background and ethnicity is about as melting-pot as Obama's: Samuelson is black, born in Ethiopia, raised in Scandinavia, made his fame and fortune in New York at the high-style restaurant Aquavit. His book is "The Soul of a New Cuisine: A Discovery of the Foods and Flavors of Africa" and it's gotten good reviews and lots of attention --- in part, no doubt, because it has an introduction written by Desmond Tutu! But the fact remains: truly African cornbread would be foofoo (sometimes called ugali or ampesi), essentially a very thick polenta, not bread as such at all, and the corn meal in it is a New World food in its origins, not an African one.
October 17 " WE ATE CORNBREAD THREE TIMES A DAY" : Get ready: articles and stories telling us to get ready for the next depression, and how, by harking back to the last Depression are on the way, complete with interviews of those who survived it.... and, sure as God made little green apples, count on many of them mentioning cornbread. Here's one example, from Springfield, Missouri's ABC radio affiliate, KSPR. Raymond Daniels --- the story doesn't give his age but says he "remembers the Thirties vividly" --- recalls hunting rabbits for money to pay the taxes, and, of course, eating the one food that is an antidote not only to hunger but to both small- and large-D depression.
July 16 CORNBREAD IN CHINA??? Yes, according to the profile of a self-sufficient couple in their seventies, who live in Hebei Province. The story appeared on ABC News Crescent is now officially gnashing her teeth because the chapter on Global Cornbreads in The Cornbread Gospels doesn't have a recipe for wo tou.
July 11 CRACKERS INSTEAD OF CORNBREAD? NOW THAT'S POOR: Even crime pays less than it used to. To cut $200,000 from the jail budget in Polk County, Florida, the inmate's diets have taken a drastic turn for the worse... so drastic that two area newspapers and three local television stations covered it. One slice of bread at breakfast, not two. No juice, fresh milk (powdered is being substituted), chocolate milk, coffee. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are being cut from the menu (to be replaced with what, one wonders?). No more fresh eggs; just "frozen egg patties." And, yes, crackers instead of cornbread. "This is jail, it's not Bern's Steakhouse," sheriff Gray Judd reportedly told inmates. No kidding.
July 10 CORNBREAD,SWAMP CABBAGE & HARD TIMES 'AT THE GATEWAY TO THE OKEFENOKE': The Charlton County Herald, Folkston, Georgia (right near the Florida border, recently interviewed a number of elders who lived through the Depression. Mrs. McCormack, age 87, left school in the fourth grade to go to work and earn much-needed cash. “It was bad I reckon, " she told the paper, " but we knew how to work hard back then. It was tough times, tough times.” She recalls meals of “swamp cabbage” and cornbread. “Mama would go out and cut down a big, old palmetto. She’d get the big old root, wash it, put seasoning in it and cook it down. We wouldn’t be hungry then.” What, we wonder, does 'swamp cabbage' taste like? Is it related to what we now call 'hearts of palm'? Social nomenclature really changes how we see and taste, and what we pay for it: as witness grits or polenta. Here's the article.
June 26 WELCOME SANITY IN THE SUGAR DEBATE: In the blog Kitchen Mysteries, Raquel writes, describes some of the differing points of view, the ingredients in her version, and adds that :"depending on what I am eating it with" (she likes it) " sweet or not." What a concept! Instead of right or wrong, Southern or Northern, the accompanying food dictates the sweetness! "With beans, I prefer not sweet," she writes. "With anything else, I like it a little sweet." No doubt this will not satisfy die-hards from either camp, but takes it from ideology to cuisine... to the category of, "What goes better here, red wine or white? Lighter or heavier? Crisp and dry, or fruity or complex?" A tiny revelation of both excellence and tolerance. Sadly, however, she disses "crumblins" (see May 14 news).
June 25 A CORNBREAD CAKE WITH BACON & APRICOTS?: Sounds totally wild, and not at all what most of us would call cornbread, but the recipe for Le Pigeon's Cornbread Cake and the remarkable description by blogger rédacteur en chef du jour on his The Chocolate of Meats are pretty ... intriguing, maybe even seductive. And, since the blog's subtitle is "Taste Matters for the Urban Epicurean", maybe we can forgive him for not getting the mojo of real cornbread. BTW, while Southerners will be outraged by the sugar (and maple syrup!) in this buttery cake, they'll probably feel right at home with the bacon. But, in dessert? Le Pigeon, by the way, is a restaurant in Portland, Oregon. Why does this not surprise us? bacon.
June 16 "SOUTHERN" CORNBREAD RECIPES ON THE NET?:Just came across this page venting on the recipes which purport to be real Southern cornbread and are all over the Internet. Check out bad cornbread and see if you agree.
May 17 CORNBREAD -- WITH OR WITHOUT BUTTERMILK --- IN JAPAN? : You've got to check this article out, from Delta Farm News. It's part cornbread family memoir, part commodities market report.
May 14 DO YOU CALL IT "CRUMBLINS", OR "CRUMBLED-INS"? : Your cornbread and milk, that is? In either case, you'll love this article, full of citations, context, anecdotes, and favorite cornbread-and0milk eaters. It's by Barry Popik, who is an editor of the Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink and is recognized as an expert on the origins of food terms like the Big Apple, and hot dog.
NATIONAL CORNBREAD FESTIVAL, SOUTH PITTSBURG, TENNESSEE, LAST WEEKEND IN APRIL
Every April, it's time for the annual National Cornbread Festival in tiny South Pittsburg, Tennessee (which is also, not coincidentally, home to Lodge Manufacturing, where the only present-day made-in-American cast-iron skillets and other cookware are forged). Lodge, along with Martha White (the South's most widely distributed cornmeal), are sponsors of the community-wide Festival. And what a community it is: cheerful, welcoming, proud of itself without being show-offy... small-town America and the American South community at its best.
2009 marked the Festival's 13th year, and as always, along with such time-honored fair standards as music, a ferris wheel, booths, there are many, many cornbreads to sample. , each more delicious than the last. I Love Cornbread's own Crescent Dragonwagon sadly missed it this year ... she's been twice, in 2003 and 2008, is determined, "as God is my witness" in the words of Scarlett O'Hara, to be back in 2010! Maybe we "I Love Cornbread!" members could plan a meet-up...
Cornbread-lovers should for sure not miss Cornbread Alley, where a dozen or so local charities and non-profits fund raise deliciously, each strutting their stuff with a different cornbread. The beverage of choice? Buttermilk, of course!
Photos
"Pictured above" ... now y'all stop drooling and get in the kitchen!
1. Country Corn Sticks: cornsticks are miniature cornbreads, baked in shaped in individual pans. The classic ones, pictured above, are shaped like miniature ears of corn, but in recent years Lodge Manufacturing has come out with both cactus-shaped cornstick pans (presumably for cornsticks made Southwestern style, with green chiles) and fish-shaped ones (to eat with fried fish, maybe if you can't quite go for all the fat in the traditional fried hushpuppies).
2. Very Lemony Cornmeal Poundcake: Mark Twain wrote "If God had meant cornbread to have sugar in it, he'd have called it cake." Now, he basically meant this as a slam on Northern (sweet) cornbread. However, this is dessert: it does have sugar, and is explicitly called "cake." But while not cornbread as such, that great grit shines through in every bite.
3. Featherbed Eggs, a soak-it-overnight, bake-it-in-the-morning breakfast casserole made with leftover cornbread as a base (plus eggs, green chiles, cheese...) .
2. Very Lemony Cornmeal Poundcake: Mark Twain wrote "If God had meant cornbread to have sugar in it, he'd have called it cake." Now, he basically meant this as a slam on Northern (sweet) cornbread. However, this is dessert: it does have sugar, and is explicitly called "cake." But while not cornbread as such, that great grit shines through in every bite.
3. Featherbed Eggs, a soak-it-overnight, bake-it-in-the-morning breakfast casserole made with leftover cornbread as a base (plus eggs, green chiles, cheese...) .
Forum
Cornbread in Alabama 1 Reply
Started by Betty Ann Lloyd. Last reply by Betty Ann Lloyd Jun 19.
Is "I Love Cornbread" a dead group? 6 Replies
Started by David A Carey. Last reply by Crescent Dragonwagon May 9.
can we make this site as sizzling as our skillets?
Started by Crescent Dragonwagon May 8.
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