Lord, have mercy upon us. Pilsbury has come out with cornbread in a can.
This is heresy, a crime against nature, a stain on humanity, a slur against all that is right and proper.
Even my mother, who hated to cook and used any shortcut she could, would be appalled.
Let’s get this straight: When you pop that can on the countertop, put the circular discs of dough in a muffin pan and bake it, you don’t get cornbread. You get what the manufacturer calls “corn swirls,” which you and I would call corn muffins. THIS IS NOT CORNBREAD, people.
Calling this abomination cornbread is like calling a three-pound yapping mop on paws a Labrador retriever. It may be a dog, but it’s not a Lab. This product is some kind of laboratory-created bread-like substance, but it ain’t cornbread.
My mother’s ancestors were hillbillies from Appalachia, from whom she inherited very particular ideas about cornbread. It was prepared one way: Patties fried in hot grease.
Mom was an amazing woman but not a great cook. If she had any downtime (very seldom with four kids, dogs, cats, hamsters, ducks and a horse), she’d be reading, crabbing, swimming in the ocean or working in the yard. Cooking was dead last on her list of priorities. She did OK; none of us starved or had rickets, but the kitchen wasn’t her thing.
Having said that, she could make three dishes like a master: Chicken and pastry; boiled fudge; and fried cornbread. Her great-grandmother scribbled a recipe for fried cornbread in the 1850s. Her sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles and cousins all made fried cornbread.
Cornbread was, by family definition, fried in a cast-iron skillet. A pan of batter baked in an oven was called “cake.”
Mom’s roast beef might be simultaneously raw and burned and her rice could crack molars, but her cornbread was manna from heaven. She combined House Autry cornmeal (both yellow and white), a big splash of buttermilk, a little bacon grease and a dash of vinegar in a bowl and let it sit for about 10 minutes. The thick batter was dropped by spoonfuls in sputtering-hot Crisco, which she called lard to the day she died. (Crisco is not lard. Lard is pork fat; Crisco is vegetable shortening.)
The resulting cornbread was crispy on the edges, soft in the middle and just greasy enough to be delicious. Us kids would devour it by the platter. That was the only kind of cornbread we knew.
I’m not sure how my siblings were enlightened, but eventually I was schooled by my college roommate’s mom. First time I went home with her for dinner, her mom pulled a pan from the oven and said, “Would you like some cornbread?”
Very politely I said, “No thank you, ma’am, and that’s not cornbread.” It just flew out of my mouth, and I could have died. My friend cringed.
Thankfully, her mom laughed at my red face (instead of chasing me from her home), and explained about baked cornbread.
“What you grew up eating is called hoe cakes. This is cornbread,” she said.
I dutifully ate a piece. It tasted like mealy, dry cake, but I told her it was delicious. I haven’t eaten it since.
And now we’re supposed to whomp a can on the counter and call it cornbread? These are strange days indeed.
P.S. I later learned that “hoe cakes” contain flour, which Mom never used in her fried patties. So, I’m sticking with CORNBREAD.
Julie R. Smith, who hasn’t actually eaten cornbread in 20 years, can be reached at widdleswife@aol.com.
