Dorcheat Bayou Cornbread & Memories...

Home. Family. Genetic memory. Call it what you will, certain recipes bring it all back, all the way through the generations and back to grandpa Van’s homestead and ripened fields of sorghum. All the way back to Van’s little girl, Sylvia, in her patchwork dress, chasing butterflies through the cornfields.

Sylvia is in the kitchen of the cabin on the bayou today. Her 94 year old hands move so swiftly that the process must be noted in a hurry, for there is no written recipe for “Grandpa Van’s Cornbread.” Of course it was never grandpa Van’s cornbread; it was grandma Josephine’s cornbread. But Van loved it so much that he would come in at the end of each day covered in pollen and sawdust so thick you couldn’t see the blue of his bib overalls, and straight to the stove he would go...looking for the moist but crisp, buttery round of cornbread.

Sylvia turns the knob on the oven and sets the temperature at 425 degrees. “This is simple”, she says, laughing. “I remember getting splinters in my fingers carrying in wood for the cook-stove. You always had to look out for snakes in that woodpile. I remember the men digging out a whole den of pit vipers from under that woodpile after daddy’s dog got bit in the nose. I was always wary of the woodpile after that.”

Sylvia picks up a bottle of Bertolli Extra Light Olive Oil and she squints at it, remembering “We use this nowadays, but when I was a girl, we had this big shiny gallon can. It was Filippo Berio brand. I remember looking at that gold and green can and knowing that this was something from far far away. How daddy felt rich just having that olive oil!”

She measures it out in the blackened 8 inch cast iron skillet, 1/8 of a cup.

“You put this on the burner and you turn the heat up high” she says. “Then get your mixing bowl and you put in the rest...”

2/3 Cup cornmeal

1/3 Cup flour

(Mix these together with a whisk)

Add:

1/4 tsp. baking soda

1/2 tsp. salt

1 tsp. baking powder “heaped up like a foothill, not a mountain.”

(Mix all together with whisk.)

Add:

2 eggs

1/3 cup olive oil

1 cup full fat buttermilk

(Mix all together with whisk.)

The cast iron skillet is hot, but not smoking. The olive oil looks like an undercurrent on the Dorcheat Bayou in the dead of winter.

Sylvia gets a handful of cornmeal from the canister, about 1/8 of a cup. She doesn’t measure it, her soft grandma hands just know. And she sprinkles this into the undertow of sizzling olive oil in the cast iron skillet, swishing the skillet around by the handle until the cornmeal is browned...just a few seconds. Then she carefully slides the skillet off the burner and then pours the smooth, pale buttercup colored cornbread mixture into the sizzling skillet. The edges bubble up. Sylvia picks up the skillets handle with a red gingham potholder and places it in the center of the oven. She looks at her watch and she winks. “Ya’ll can set a timer for 20 minutes, but I didn’t grow up with such fancy things. Mama had an hour-glass and that was her timer.”

Sylvia gazes out the window at the Spanish moss, hanging like ancient moth-eaten curtains in the century old cedar trees. “I remember the lightening bugs in the summertime out here...90 years back. They were so thick they would light up the whole garden. The crickets were plentiful too, and oh how you could hear them! You don’t think about that now so much. The time before electricity. But I can tell you, it was quiet. Next time your power goes out for some reason, you just listen. Listen to the quiet.”

As the cabin fills up with the sweet smell of baking cornbread, Sylvia moves about, setting out the steaming pot-roast, ham, beans, black-eyed peas, potato salad, green onions, sorghum muffins, fresh garden salad, and Josephine’s famous crook-necked squash. Sweet potato pie sits on the window sill, cooling.

“This is a lovely Sunday Supper!” Sylvia says, smiling. “We never did go hungry, but things were different back then. We ate what was in season, or whatever daddy brought home. Sometimes that was a whole mess of fish, and mama would fry up potatoes and onions with that. Collard greens, and cornbread. There was always the cornbread. Of course we had jars of black-eyed peas on the shelf too. There was food. But I recall some winters where we lived on beans and cornbread with a little chunk of some kind of meat; just waiting for Spring to come and bring the food back around!”

Sylvia pushes the window open in the kitchen and a sultry breeze blows through. The long bay of a hound-dog can be heard across the vast green miles.

“That cornbread sure smells good!” Sylvia’s blue eyes twinkle. “Things are simpler now. You know, people are always taking about living in simpler times but they really mean more rustic times. There was nothing simpler about those times. Not really. We had a big canister of cornmeal too, and one of flour. Now, the flour, we bought at the store in town, but not the cornmeal. Daddy grew the corn and dried it. Then we would take a wagon load to town to the grist mill, where they would grind it up for us. Daddy paid in corn for that service. Same with the sorghum. I sure remember daddy’s favorite thing and that was a big glazed clay bowl of beans with a slab of cornbread, and some sorghum syrup. Every year at harvest time we would load up the wagon and take the sorghum crop to town where they had a press for it. It was a big wooden wheel with horses that made it go around. It crushed the plants down and the syrup came out. We would take some jugs home and daddy would leave some there for payment.”

Sylvia smiles at these memories.

“We had a milk cow then, Fanny. We had to milk her early every morning, rain or shine; and mama made butter, and the buttermilk for the cornbread. We had chickens and they laid the eggs that went in the cornbread. Our food came from right here on the farm. We didn’t know any different. But things sure weren’t simpler, were they?”

The timer goes off, filling the kitchen with an unnatural buzz.

Sylvia pulls the piping hot cornbread out of the oven and inspects it. “Two more minutes” she says and pops it back in. “You want that top to be a nice golden brown.” Noted.

Two minutes later, Sylvia pulls the skillet back out and says “Just perfect!” She flips it upside down onto the center of a well worn glass plate and we are indeed looking at perfection. And history. We are all filled with a bounty of Southern food and Dorcheat Bayou memories...

Thank you, sweet Sylvia.