Cornbread Is Personal
If you want to know me and my people, let me put a crusty wedge in your bowl.
The farmhouse floor is cold as icicles.
My feet frantically search for the house shoes I know are somewhere near the foot of the bed. Since I woke, I’ve been careful not to disturb the two forms inches away from me, buried under warm flannel sheets and heavy quilts. Silence is necessary. I hold my breath to ensure my slumbering wife and child continue to stay put. If I want to conduct my experiment this morning, I must let my sleeping family lie. Finally, I catch what must be a slipper with my big toe, then locate its mate, and slowly slide off the king mattress and into the darkness of the adjacent room.
What happens next has happened on countless mornings before and since then. The ritual of bathing myself in florescent kitchen lights, starting a pot of coffee, preheating the oven, and once again chasing down the flavorful haints of my upbringing. Sometimes, in those holy hours, with the help of flour, butter, and sugar, I stumble upon an incantation so potent I can travel back in time.
Food has a way of doing that. Connecting me back to something I was afraid of losing.
Growing up on the cusp of Appalachia, cornbread was something I ate weekly and always thought I’d have—until I didn’t. It came from the hands and labor of my maternal grandmother, nicknamed “Dood.”
Dood and my grandfather lived on a tobacco farm an earshot away from my childhood home. Meals for her were not rooted in culinary exploration and refinement but birthed out of the practical and necessary. Her efficiency in making do with what she had available, turning the ordinary into the sacred, is why her descendants talk of her with a reverence usually reserved for saints. Fitting since she was one.
My mother worked a standard office job—9 to 5. My father worked a third-shift factory gig. Sacrifices from both to allow our family to enter what is now a nonexistent middle class. This meant when my sister and I rolled off the bus from school, we had the choice to go home and keep quiet so Dad could sleep or track through the cow pasture and head to our grandparents’ house for afternoon cartoons and snacks. Occasionally, this resulted in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and microwaveable waffles with syrup. It was the 1980s. But, more often, it meant grabbing a bowl of something simmering on the back eye of Dood’s stovetop. If it was pintos or chili beans, you knew cornbread was coming, and it was worth the wait.
My grandmother's cornbread was magnificent, and all other cornbread I've consumed over the years starts at a disadvantage because of this. Simple and pure, it was not made with the bourgeois crowd in mind.
My grandmother's cornbread was magnificent, and all other cornbread I've consumed over the years starts at a disadvantage because of this. Simple and pure, it was not made with the bourgeois crowd in mind. Yet, it was sophisticated enough to transcend and connect the different folks who were fortunate enough to gather at her table.
In the winter of 2001, she was preached off to heaven. Immediately, a matriarch-less void was felt, and a lifetime of cooking knowledge was stripped away from her family. My grandmother didn’t teach her children to cook. No recipes were officially passed down. My mother once recounted a time when she asked my grandmother to show her how to make biscuits.
“No,” Dood responded, “because if I show you, you’ll get stuck making them the rest of your life.”
Words laced with truth from a woman who watched much of the ebb and flow of her life from the outpost of an oven. Like the pots and pans that never got the chance to walk away from her stovetop, neither did Dood. Her genius kept her stuck there. Her cooking was held in a tight tension: she excelled at and certainly valued it, but she always seemed to think that something or someone else deserved more praise. Those unspoken “something else’s” rested on the hopes and dreams she clung to for her children and grandchildren. Dood wanted us to explore a calling instead of accepting our gifts. In her world, I don’t believe she thought the two were harmonious.
With my grandmother gone, I worried I’d never again taste certain staples like her stewed potatoes, dumplings, and cornbread. At least not in a way that nourished my belly and soul alike. Those offerings I wrote off as becoming just a memory. Believing this, I settled for that which reminded me of her.
When the family circled like carrion, laying claim to this or that relic of the departed, I was asked if there was anything of hers I’d like to have. I requested only a tiny set of Hull bowls because, in those vessels, her cornbread would lay. There, under a ladle or two of beans, soaking up all that flavor and goodness, her cornbread was a sunken treasure. Working like grace, that small piece of fried gold was a treat you weren’t sure you deserved but somehow got anyway. This semblance I took for unconditional love drew me to her even if she existed in a place where I couldn’t follow.
If one was so inclined to crack open a bible to the book of James, one might come across a verse about drawing near to God and God drawing near to you. In drawing close to my grandmother and the food from her kitchen, I’ve been moved, pulled, dragged even, to answer the question of who I am and where I come from.
I searched all over, in Southern cookbook after Southern cookbook, for something like Dood’s cornbread. Thumbing through words written by Edna Lewis, Sean Brock, and a dozen other well-worn volumes of recipes collected by Rotary Clubs and churches, I pined to come across The One.
Cornbread is personal.
Leading up to this morning, I searched all over, in Southern cookbook after Southern cookbook, for something like Dood’s cornbread. Thumbing through words written by Edna Lewis, Sean Brock, and a dozen other well-worn volumes of recipes collected by Rotary Clubs and churches, I pined to come across The One. All were good, but all fell short. Some flirted with me, urging and discouraging me simultaneously—goading me to keep searching but creating a misdirected jealousy at those who still held the recipes of their kinfolk. Why couldn’t I locate mine?
My idea of providence is looser than a customer’s belt at a Cracker Barrel after they go all in on the infamous Country Boy Breakfast. So, I'm leery of calling my stumbling onto Chef and owner of Hickory at Nicewonder Farm & Vineyards Travis Milton a divine act.
Then again, maybe it was.
Milton is an apostle for the foodways of southwestern Virginia, preaching the preservation of mountain cooking and his beloved greasy beans to all who’ll listen. His upbringing and similar-sounding supper-table staples struck a chord with me. I hastily consumed articles and videos of his thoughts and influences.
A name he kept repeating was Ronni Lundy.
Lundy has been an authority on Appalachian cooking for over thirty years. She has the hardware to back it up: four James Beard Foundation Award medallions. More importantly, she has the recognition of her peers and a new generation of Southern Appalachian chefs. To walk in the works of Lundy is to saunter beside the voice of a region and its people.
My grandmother would say, “People think a lot of her.”
With the proper endorsements lining up, I ordered a used copy of her first book—Shuck Beans, Stack Cakes and Honest Fried Chicken: The Heart and Soul of Southern Country Kitchens (1991). Inside, I discovered, in her words, “real cornbread.”
I take the first bite, and I taste absolution. No sounds from the bedroom where my spouse and daughter sleep. They don’t know; they don’t see me—a 40-something man in a union suit with bedhead and beard, openly weeping because he has tasted a memory.
This recipe stares back at me from a page stained with the remnants of oil from an unknown finger—a phantom digit motioning me to grab cast iron off the wall and drop heavy tablespoons of bacon drippings onto an already well-seasoned surface. By now, the oven is hotter than a Pentecostal sermon, so in goes the skillet. I spend the next few minutes rounding up local buttermilk and eggs, salt, and self-rising cornmeal. The cornmeal has come a long way to fall into my mixing bowl. I got it from the Old Mill of Guilford, which has been around since the late eighteenth century and is little more than a stone’s throw from where I was raised in North Carolina. My mother and father had their engagement photos taken there. My family has a history at the mill, making it feel like this cornmeal and I have a story to tell together.
I clean as I go, putting items back in the larder where I found them before resting against the counter. The morning sun is cracking over the mountains, and I silently pray the spell will work and try to come to terms with what that will mean to me. As twenty-two minutes tick off the timer, I retrace the journey of how my family and I moved to the Northeast and why, by leaving the South, I became more Southern. Cornbread isn’t the only thing I miss; it’s just the embodiment of what I understand to be home. A home I worked most of my life to leave. A place I’ll always call home no matter where I might come to live.
The buzz of the timer rings through the air, calling me to grab a mitt and jump into action. Opening the door, I’m careful of the heat rushing toward my face. I grab a plate to flip it out. It releases with the most reassuring thud I’ve ever heard. Choirs of angels would do well to mimic the sound.
And it is there: gazing at the plate, I see the perfect, slightly dark shade of the speckled brown crust. I knew it would be right and everything moving forward would be all right, too. I knew it would taste like my childhood, my grandmother, and all the roots I associate with a place I abruptly left without confessing how much it means to me. My unspoken appreciation lingering like a hand on a doorknob, unwilling to turn and walk out, move on, say goodbye because I’m discovering I don’t want to leave.
Watching the warmth wafting towards the heavens, I cut a crunch-inducing piece. If this cornbread hits, I’ll learn I can carry the South with me—or at least find slices of it in a Wagner skillet.
I take the first bite, and I taste absolution. No sounds from the bedroom where my spouse and daughter sleep. They don’t know; they don’t see me—a 40-something man in a union suit with bedhead and beard, looking like the eighth Pontipee brother, openly weeping because he has tasted a memory. What rolls down my cheeks, my daughter would call “happy tears.” I think about waking her and her mother but decide against it. There’ll be more hot cornbread in their future. Instead, I think about my grandmother and what I’d say to her.
I’d tell her that who she was and what she knew were priceless. I'd tell her that her grandson cooks for people like she did because he’s trying to learn to love like she did. I’d tell her I’m passing her food and story down to the people sitting around every table I’m lucky enough to be invited to. Telling folks, if you want to really know me and where I come from, you need to set your bowl in front of me so I can show you.
Justin Cox is an ordained minister, late-night baker, and displaced Southerner. He's a regular columnist at Baptist News Global, Good Faith Media, and The Christian Citizen, where his writing often engages the intersectionality of food and faith. He currently resides in New England with his family.
Your Dood would smile such a warm, shy, sweet smile reading these words. As did I. Thank you for touching my heart. And for putting words to my weekly attempts to taste memories. 🙏🏻 God bless you and your writing and your cornbread.
Thanks you for the kind words. Since finding and tasting this memory, I really have been sharing it with all sorts of people. To think her cornbread and other dishes are being passed on by me…well, if I never do anything else, this will be enough.
I believe, dear Justin, that you and I share a very similar, if not same, cornbread recipe. I have my grandmother’s, written in her jangly handwriting, on a beaten up index card. She sent it to me after college, with her “round pan”. An iron skillet is what she sent. The front of the card are correct measurements like 3/4 C self rising cornmeal, but on the back, she wrote, “about a small handful”. I haven’t been brave enough yet to go that way. But the bacon grease, the golden crust, the crackle of the first cut…in our home, this is a salty, savory, moist, smothered in butter, buttermilk or dropped in any number of beans, stews, chilis, and it can not be beat. No Jiffy box is ever coming close. Glad to hear you found yours, it makes the best cornbread dressing for Thanksgiving.
I have a few of her recipe books with her own version of “jangly” handwritings. That makes it extra special, doesn’t it? And while I dont mind a box of jiffy muffins from time to time, they just ain’t “real cornbread.” 💜