Polite conversation gives inspiration

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July 4, 2009

By JOEL WILSON The Glasgow Daily Times Sat Jul 04, 2009, 02:03 PM CDT

GLASGOW — First off, my apologies for being absent from this space for most of the month of June. It was a busy month but I can’t claim that as an excuse. Just a dry spell I guess.

You need inspiration for writing a column and you sometimes find them in the most unexpected places.

I got one Sunday while visiting an elderly couple with home communion at a local extended care facility. I've been there before and I’ve grown fond of the gentleman and his wife who now call it home.

They had just finished their lunch and he had left a nice chunk of cornbread, which he invited me to have. He said he just didn’t like big cakes of cornbread, preferring his instead in the thin and crispy mode from a black iron skillet.

I politely declined his offer but the thought sprang into mind that I had never written about cornbread and its many variations.

Personally I prefer the big thick cakes. That’s the way my mother made it in a black iron skillet. Like our elderly friend, my wife likes the thin and crispy verson, preferably in corn sticks, but she meets me half way and makes it fairly thick in an iron skillet.

Cornbread is strictly an American food, one of those staples passed along to us by Native Americans who were using corn (maize) in many ways before Europeans ever visited North America. It is commonly associated with the south but cornbread is enjoyed all over the country. It was popular among southern soldiers during the Civil War because it was cheap, easily assessible and easy to transport as leftovers.

Everyone has their favorite ways of making cornbread from the high-rising fluffy loaves to sticks or muffins, fried, or in hushpuppies.

I like the fried variety. I've heard it called fried cornbread, hoecakes, johnny cakes, griddle cakes corncakes, and hot water cornbread. My mother always made fried cornbread when she made potato soup on Sunday night. I’ve never found any that matched hers including my own.

I found a close second one time but alas, they’re no longer available. When the newspaper was on South Green Street, I would leave at lunch through the pressroom door, go up an ally into the back of the Rapp Building and into Polson’s Restaurant on the South Square where Angie Calvert made hoe cakes with buttermilk. Really good stuff.

My brother Earl crumbled up cornbread into a glass of buttermilk and ate it with a spoon but that was never to my liking.

Today, cornbread is served with barbecue and chili in fine restaurants.

But back to the elderly gentleman. He related that he would have eaten his cornbread if it had been covered with soup beans. That's the way most of us from these parts like our cornbread, with pinto beans and onions.

And cornbread stuffing is the best with turkey at Thanksgiving, another southern tradition.

When my mother was making cornbread for stuffing, she baked it in a big rectangular pan, which always looked strange to me. I was used to seeing it in the black skillet.

That leads me to one of my brother Earl’s favorite corny stories.

It seems the farm boy was back home after his first semester of college. His dad wanted to know what his tobacco money had gone for and asked the boy if he had learned anything. The boy said he had learned algebra. Impressed, the father said, “well speak me some.”

The boy replied, pi-r-square.

The old farmer was perplexed. “Boy, he said, it may be at that school but ever one round here knows pie are round, cornbread are square.”

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