Rockin' Cornbread

My mom used to have this marvelous little 6" cast iron cornbread skillet.  I can't possibly begin to estimate how many lovely, lightly browned little lumps of love we ate out of that skillet.  Summer and winter, so many suppers were completed with cornbread.

Mom taught my niece how to make cornbread and eventually gave Ali that pan when Mom thought her cornbread making days were through.  I inherited my Grandma Trotter's iron cornbread skillet, but Grandma's family was larger and cornbread was for more than supper, so my pan measures closer to 8".  Thereby my problem.  I never seemed to get the hang of making that larger batch of cornbread.  And now that my family at home is down to Edward and me (and the dog), we always ended up throwing away leftover cornbread.  That's a Southern sin, ya'll!

But my mom began to miss her little cornbread pan and mentioned it to some group or other (probably her Sunday School class).  Presto!  Two people gave her used (thank goodness!) 6" cast iron cornbread skillets.  So guess what?  Tonight I made a BEAUTIFUL batch of outside-crunchy, inside-just-right cornbread!  Yeah!

I know Celestine Sibley's mother wouldn't approve of my efforts (because I used self-rising cornmeal), but I'm sharing the recipe I mostly used.  Mom gave it to me with the little pan.  It's not the recipe she used all those years; Celestine's mother would have approved my mom's old plain cornmeal efforts.  This one came from a local North Georgia educator, the principal of the first school where I taught in fact.  As I say, I thought this recipe rocked.

Charles Henry Arp's Cornbread for 4


1 cup self-rising cornmeal (I used white )
1 Tablespoon self-rising flour (I didn't have any self-rising flour so I used Kentucky Kernel Seasoned Flour)
1/4 cup cooking oil
3/4 cup buttermilk
1 egg


Beat whole egg in mixing bowl.  Add other ingredients (I heated the oil in the skillet in the oven first) and mix well.  Place mixture in a warm 6" iron skillet.  Bake at 450 degrees Fahrenheit in a preheated oven for approximately 20 minutes.

Yummy.  Oh, and the yellow-eyed soup peas (from dried peas), salmon patties and chow-chow were pretty good too.

Addendum 12/9/2012: I use ONLY real buttermilk.  Don't even try to pawn any of that "reduced fat" stuff off on me!  The real thing is getting harder to find, but thank goodness some stores around still carry Marburger Farm Dairy Gourmet Buttermilk and better yet, Mayfield Whole Cultured Buttermilk.  Anyone who identifies another brand of whole buttermilk, please let me know!

Make Room for Daddy's Cookbooks

Cookbooks & Whiskeys Cabinet

Drinks Books Case

 

Sometimes I wonder whether I'll eventually need to move out of our house in order for Edward to have enough room for his cookbooks and back issues of cooking magazines.  Seriously.

At least he does tend to make use of some of them, concocting wonderfully enjoyable meals from the ideas he finds there.  My standard complaint though, is that, once he makes something, even if it turns out to be GREAT, we'll never, ever have it again.  Once a dish is conquered, the thrill must be gone or something.

On our recent trip to the South Carolina coast (Wild Dunes on the Isle of Palms), Edward purchased one of those local, collected, bound with a plastic comb cookbooks, Seafood Recipes by South Carolina Shrimpers Association: Recipes Furnished by Wives of South Carolina Shrimpers and Friends.  This copy was published in 1976, which means it contains both The Original South Carolina Shrimpers Cookbook along with new recipes for this edition.  He actually READ the whole thing at the beach.  And a good thing that turned out to be too, because he found a recipe for Green Goddess Salad Dressing (from Mrs. C. A. Magwood, Jr., btw) that made last night's ubiquitous tossed salad much less so.  Yum.


I thought I'd share our find the way it appears in the book:

GREEN GODDESS SALAD DRESSING
1 cup chopped parsley
3/4 cup chopped onions
1 clove garlic
1/2 pint sour cream
2 Tbsp. lemon juice
1 cup mayonnaise
1 pkg. Bleu cheese
1 tsp. sugar
Blend in blender; salt and pepper to taste.  May be used as a raw vegetable dip or on cole slaw, and tossed salad.

Of course Edward played around with this recipe.  I don't know what Ms. Magwood meant by a "package" of Bleu cheese, but Edward used around 2 tablespoons of Maytag.  He used 4 cloves of locally-grown, Romanian Red garlic, which is fairly spicy.  He started out using the blender, but switched to the food processor, with much better results.  (I'm trying to get Edward to write this part of this blog entry for himself, but he refuses.)  As unbelievable as this will sound to our children, we didn't have an entire cup of sour cream in the house, so he used only what we had and supplemented with a little milk (don't know why he didn't use the buttermilk we DID have; he says he would next time).

Anyway, for others who remember Green Goddess dressing (the couple of brands you might still be able to find in most grocery stores just aren't the real thing), you might want to give this a try. 

I'm lobbying for Pickled Shrimp or Shrimp Chowder next.