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.

Reading Whatever I Want in America

I’ve been working in libraries for 30 years or so now.  I’ve seen a lot of “Banned Books Weeks” come and go.  I’ve never felt completely comfortable with that name; I’m a stickler for word definitions.  So I’ve never been much for tooting the censorship horn during one week’s attention.  But this year a co-worker (and co-book group member) said something that’s made me ponder more about what it means to take risks in order to read.  One title our book group read and discussed was Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, by Dai Sijie.  This is a semi-autobiographical novel about young people who do risk their lives to read Western classic literature in China during the Cultural Revolution.  Another book I’ve read, Reading Lolita in Tehran: a Memoir in Books, by Azar Nafisi, spoke to the courage required in some places to read and to learn today. 

So I began to wonder about what leads governments (and/or theocracies) to ban books.  Don’t report me to the Board of Librarianship, but I did a little search on wikipedia and confirmed my previous notions; most banned books run afoul of officials for political reasons.  Thus, to list only a few examples, the U. S. S. R./Russia banned Doctor Zhivago, The Gulag Archipelago, Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Rights of Man; Nazi Germany banned All Quiet on the Western Front and The Metamorphosis and the United States (or parts thereof) has seen fit to ban The Grapes of Wrath (California) and Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Southern states).  The Da Vinci Code was banned in Lebanon and Not Without My Daughter in Iran. And I’m not sure reading The Satanic Verses still might not be literally risky in Bangladesh, Egypt, India, Iran, Kenya, Kuwait, Liberia, Papua New Guinea, Pakistan, Senegal, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, and Thailand, some of the countries where this notorious book has been banned.

Other than politics, then sex and obscenity get books banned.  Some examples of titles banned in various places as obscene?  Brave New World, Fanny Hill, Lady Chatterly’s Lover, The God of Small Things, Howl, Naked Lunch, and the aforementioned Lolita.  

And, having also mentioned the Cultural Revolution, I didn’t know, prior to reading this wikipedia article, that China once banned Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland due to its anthropomorphized animal characters.  You think that’s odd?  A public library I used to work for had to deal with one woman’s complaint that we shouldn’t have children's books containing talking animals because “that’s a lie.”  How lucky should I feel to have been born where this little bit of ignorance is one individual’s narrow-mindedness instead of a very large nation’s political precept?  Would I risk my life to follow Alice's white rabbit down his hole?

Of course many of the books we’ll see displayed during “Banned Books Week” this year will not have been really banned; they’ve been “challenged.”  Someone somewhere thinks he or she should decide what you or I (or, more likely, our children) get a chance to read.  No thanks, Would-Be Censor; I’m happy to make up my own mind.

If anyone is looking for a good banned/challenged book to read, here are a few I’d recommend:

• Reading Lolita in Tehran: a Memoir in Books, by Azar Nafisi
• The Color Purple, by Alice Walker
• The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini
• Beloved, by Toni Morrison
• Bridge to Terebithia, by Katherine Paterson
• The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck
• All the King's Men, by Robert Penn Warren
• The Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton
• In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote
• “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” and Other Stories, by Flannery O'Connor
• Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys
• The Beautiful and Damned, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeline L’Engle
• The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood.

And I think I’ll re-read Alice’s adventures... because I can and because they’re wonderful.

Eating on the SC Coast

Here’s where and what we ate on our trip to the Isle of Palms, South Carolina:

Morgan Creek Grill, Isle of Palms

• Fried platter (w/ slaw & fries): shrimp & oysters
• Fried platter (w/ slaw & fries): shrimp, oysters, scallops & flounder

Shem Creek Bar & Grill, Mount Pleasant

• hushpuppies
• stone crab claws
• Big Guy gumbo 
• Seafood Wando
• Bloody Marys

Melvin’s Bar-B-Que, Mount Pleasant

• Big Joe pork sandwich w/ onion rings
• Little Joe pork sandwich w/ onion rings

Seel’s on Sullivan’s Island, Sullivan’s Island

• crab dip
• grouper sandwich (w/ fries & hush puppies
• grouper basket (w/slaw & hush puppies 
• Bloody Marys

See Wee Restaurant, Awendaw

• hush puppies
• she crab soup (w/ sherry on the side)
• shrimp & scallop platter See Wee style (w/ slaw, fried okra & collard greens)
• See Wee platter of fried shrimp, scallops, oysters & flounder (w/ slaw, onion rings & ?)
• coconut cake and carrot cake (which we brought home to eat later)

The stars of the eats were the VERY fresh stone crab claws & Bloody Marys at Shem Creek and the fried oysters at Morgan Creek.  The Big Guy gumbo and Seafood Wando made good leftovers back at our villa at Wild Dunes.  And oddly enough, a nice house salad with hot bacon vinaigrette dressing for Donna and some fried fish for Edward at a Fatz Cafe on the way home!  We’ll be trying the Fatz here in Athens now.  I’ve come to the conclusion that South Carolinians (at least the ones who eat out and/or tourists) must like their food on the extremely rich side and that we like our onion rings lightly battered instead of the thick-thick-thick way we kept getting.

So we didn’t eat at any fancy spots this trip (and didn’t order any wine anywhere!), but we got our fill of fried foods for awhile.  I wish we could get really good seafood anytime we wanted instead of having to *flounder* ourselves on our rare trips to the beach.

50 foods Donna craves

50 foods Donna CRAVES (in some semblance of order):

Fresh, creamed/fried, Silver Queen corn
Fried pies (apricot is the best, but any dried fruit will do)
Apple dumplings w/ Grandma’s milky-sweet “dip”
Cornbread (to accompany a lot of other stuff on this list)
Fried bacon
Beef steak (filet, rib-eye, t-bone, skirt: most anything!)
Crunchy Cheetos
Vidalia onions (fixed just about any way)
 Fried crookneck squash
 Chicken and dumplings (“slicks”-style)
 Heirloom tomatoes
 Pasta (best plain w/ olive oil & sea salt)
 Ice cream (especially hand-cranked, homemade, vanilla)
 Cheese (just about any kind you can name)
 Lay’s potato chips (plain)
 French fries (the skinnier, the better)
 Smoked pork barbeque
 Fried chicken (thighs are my favorite)
 Pecan pralines (that's pronounced pe-CON, ya'll)
 Black-eyed peas
 Turnip greens
 Meat loaf (I’ll make it myself, thank you, with a little ground pork added in)
 Biscuits and gravy (can't believe my mom doesn't make this anymore!)
 Potato soup
 Egg salad
 Baked beans
 Fried okra
 Chicken salad
 Fried green tomatoes
 Corn fritters
 Bread pudding
 Sausage (most any way)
 Fried fish (No one has ever taken me fishing in my entire life and I'm still waiting....)
 White half-runners (fully cooked & seasoned)
 Baked sweet potatoes
 Salmon patties (ask Edward about this)
 Chess pie
 Fried chicken livers
 Shrimp (any way at all!)
 Cinnamon toast
 Cheesecake (NY style)
 Scrambled eggs
 Turkey w/ cornbread dressing & giblet gravy
 Ground beef tacos (crispy)
 School lunchroom yeast rolls
 Pancakes w/ butter and maple syrup
 Fudge (w/out marshmallow gunk)
 Fried frogs’ legs
 Pumpkin anything
 Grandma Trotter’s Christmas jam cake

OK, load up my plate!  (But come to think of it, mashed potatoes and/or cabbage slaw are de rigueur with several of these dishes; maybe I didn't explore sides quite enough!)  And pour me a table wine or a glass of sweetened iced tea.

"The Best Pound Cake I Ever Tasted"

What a great dessert to carry to meetings, reunions, funerals, homecomings, tailgates, parties and potluck.  Pound Cake!

My mentor librarian, Ethelene Dyer Jones, had a really good recipe for pound cake.  Ethelene made so many that her husband, Rev. Grover Jones, learned how to make them too and baked them often himself.


Ethelene & Grover Jones' Pound Cake:

3 1/2 cups sifted plain flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 1/4 cup shortening
2 1/2 cups sugar
5 eggs
1 cup milk
2 teaspoons of 2 different flavorings (lemon, almond, vanilla or butternut)

Sift together the sifted flour, salt and baking powder.  Beat together shortening and sugar and continue to beat, adding eggs on at a time.  Continue to beat, adding dry ingredients alternately with milk.  Beat well after each addition.  Beat in flavorings at end.  Bake in a greased and floured tube pan at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for 1 hour and 10 minutes.

For their Walking Across Egypt Gwinnett Reads a few years ago, Gwinnett County Public Library including a couple of pound cake baking contests as part of the festivities.  The staff winner was submitted by Anne Henson.

Aunt Hortense's Poundcake


2 sticks butter at room temperature
1 tablespoon vanilla flavoring
3 cups sugar
6 large eggs at room temperature
1 cup heavy whipping cream at room temperature
1/2 teaspoon salt
3 cups flour

Preheat oven to 325 degrees Fahrenheit.  Whip the butter until creamy.  Add the vanilla and whip until well-mixed.  Gradually add the sugar and whip the butter and sugar on high speed for several minutes.  Reduce the speed and add the eggs one at a time, mixing thoroughly between each one.  Add salt to flour.  Alternate mixing the flour and cream into the butter/sugar, ending with flour.  Pour batter into a greased tube pan and run knife through the batter to prevent air pockets.  Bake for 1 1/2 hours.  Let cake cool before removing from pan.

(Thanks to author Clyde Edgerton for "The Best Pound Cake I Ever Tasted" phrase.)