Pour about an eighth of an inch of oil, corn or vegetable, in the bottom of an eight inch skillet; doesn’t have to be cast iron, but it helps. Stick it in the oven on a high rack at about 425.
Then take three cups of white self-rising corn meal and about half a cup self-rising flour, mix in a bowl with a scant teaspoon baking soda and a dash or so of salt. Add about 1/3 cup of corn or vegetable oil and mix until about the consistency of rice. Add one large beaten egg, mix well, then add enough buttermilk to make a thick batter. Spoon in a splash of water.
Take your skillet out of the oven, tilt to coat the sides with oil, and test the heat with a drop of batter. It should sizzle; if not, heat some more. When oil is sufficiently hot, pour in the batter, shake the skillet to level it out, and bake until golden brown and a little crusty. Remove by inverting skillet.
Eat with butter immediately, and rejoice in being alive.
Tamale pie is made by all kinds of people for all kinds of occasions. The bones of controversy in this dish (and I assure you that there will always be an absolute skeleton in any given bowl, plate, or skewer of anything) involve the use of cheese in the bread and beans in the chili. Me, I bake plain cornbread batter over a pan of mild chili with beans and call it tamale pie.
The first time I submitted a Mississippi top twelve, it was like throwing a June bug down in a flock of chickens.
The pot roast was devastated by a barrage of loyalists who maintained it’s “just got Yankee written all over it.” The red velvet cake was accused, convicted, and shot for being a Waldorf recipe, and the pecan pie was mined by a sweet potato. I substituted pound cake for red velvet and sweet potato pie for pecan. The roast lost to stewed greens–which damn near lost out to limas.
Here’s the treaty, but rumor has it the pecan pie faction plans a fifth column action from Belzoni.
My Choctaw ancestors–and other people across the continent–made bread from maize long my other DNA was run out of the British Isles for debt and insurrection.
Choctaws made what is called shuck bread (bunaha) by mixing water and cornmeal into a stiff paste, forming the paste into balls, wrapping them in cooked corn shucks and boiling them for about an hour. They stored well and were reheated by boiling before serving. European expatriates made a similar bread by mixing meal, water, salt and lard into a batter and cooking it on a flat metal surface like a pancake. These are called hoecakes or dogbread. Much later came what we know as cornbread.
(Or at least what I know it as.)
When it comes to cornbread, I labored long under the impression that I was a confirmed orthodox. Yellow corn meal? A quarter cup of sugar? Nuh-uh, no way. That’s not cornbread, that’s corncake. A recipe using yellow meal, sugar and even (horror of horrors) butter just has Yankee written all over it. A Michigan-born hostess once served me such bread, and I’m sorry to say I pointed out what a culinary abomination it was. She set me in my place by being quite gracious about my gaffe, which made her a lady, and after dinner her husband offered to punch me in the nose, which made him a gentleman. (We still exchange Christmas cards.)
I once ran up on a California recipe for cornbread using vanilla flavoring that confirmed a whole slew of suspicions I’d long harbored about the frivolity if not to say instability of the West Coast mentality. I’ve also come across recipes with dill, cheddar cheese, yogurt, skim milk, blue corn meal, creamed corn, and even (I swear to God) tofu. What passes under the name of Mexican cornbread is subject to all manner of atrocities, the most bizarre of which I’ve found includes beef jerky and cactus flowers.
As a confirmed orthodox, I thought I was sitting on the front pew with my recipe, which has only white meal, just a little flour, eggs, buttermilk, salt and baking powders. But I found out that there are those who would cry, “Backslider!” at the thought of using bleached meal or even eggs. I just had never considered making cornbread without eggs, then I found that among the recipes you see printed on most meal packages you see this is called “egg bread,” and my faith began to falter. These no-egg purists, I began to believe, were true cornbread devotees who enjoyed a more chaste form of elemental Southern sustenance. I felt horribly decadent, which was not such a new sensation for me, but a cornbread recipe certainly was a novel indicator of my moral turpitude (more official records exist).
I got over it. After all, I had learned how to make cornbread at my mother’s knee, and she was a queen among cooks: “Honi soit qui mal y pense”, you wretched peasants.
While researching the history of Mexican cornbread (the U.S. version,), I discovered our “Southern” cornbread in several Mexican cookbooks. Called–somewhat unsurprisingly–pan de maiz, this recipe seems to have found a place on tables in southern Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras.
One recipe I found on a Mexican website claims to have come by way of Maine and even employs buttermilk. While such things aren’t inconceivable, I suddenly felt as if the Culinary Improbability Drive had been activated, and I’d turned into an enormous zucchini hush puppy and about to plunge into a roiling intergalactic catfish fryer.
I felt much the same way about Malaysian grits.
The origins of what passes as Mexican cornbread in the U.S. are obscured in a cloud of “women’s magazine” articles and speculation. The dish has all sorts of atrocious variations; extreme examples include any number of beans and meats, cacti, seeds, flowers, and a California aberration with blue tofu that also ranks high on my Improbability Algorithm.
For my part, I’ve devised a recipe very close to Ur-meal bread. Add whole kernel corn, peppers and queso in equal proportions to a good stiff cornbread batter. I use thin-walled mild peppers 1:1 with thinly-sliced jalapeno. Drop by spoonfuls into a well-oiled skillet, brown on both sides, and place in a single layer on a cookie sheet in a low oven to crisp. Top with salsa, sour cream, and/or guacamole.
