Tag Archives: cornbread

Cornbread with a Side of Stalinist Hijinks

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von bremzenLast fall at the Brooklyn Book Festival, I wandered over to one of the stages where a panel of food writers were holding court and became instantly charmed by a woman with audacious glasses, voluminous scarves and a loud Russian-accented voice. She was just the blend of frank and weird that I like in my authors, so I resolved to read her newest book, Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing.

I’m so glad I did. Anya von Bremzen’s bizarre mash-up of cookbook, family history and anthropological study of Homo Sovieticus is one of the oddest but most enjoyable food volumes I’ve ever laid hands on. There is surprisingly little talk of borscht, but instead you’ll learn about Russian meat patties while also finding out how Stalin kept himself amused at his summer house meals. (It involved leaving tomatoes on chairs and exhorting high Politburo officials to put “dick” signs on Khruschev’s back. That wacky, mass-murdering prankster!) And the book is beautifully written, so much so that I laughed out loud when she described how her ex-boyfriend humbly offered himself up to co-author her first book and correct her “wonky English.”

cornbreadThe USSR seemingly having been full of voracious meat-eaters whenever supplies allowed, there aren’t a lot of recipes here for a vegetarian to attempt, but von Bremzen did provide a recipe for cornbread that I was eager to try. She actually included it as something of a joke, representative of Khrushchev’s certainty that corn was going to solve all of the USSR’s food shortage problems. Instead, he managed only to baffle and disgust millions of Russians who held firmly to the belief that bread could be made only with wheat. For this, he earned the title Corn Man, which I gather sounds like a worse insult in Russian than in English.

Anyway, the USSR was a massive place, and some of the people there did, in fact, eat corn, like in Moldova, whence the author drew the cornbread recipe. I was attracted to it mostly because it calls for as much feta cheese as it does cornmeal, with some butter and sour cream to boot. Continue reading →

Squirrel Stews of Our Forefathers: Oddities in Presidential Eating

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rushmore

Jefferson is thinking, "Seriously, Abe, you should check out this waffle iron I found in Holland."

Presidents’ Day is one of those holidays that I have too often let slip by without much notice, so this past week I resolved to make it a more personal experience. Given my obsessions with food, I landed on the presidential page of foodtimeline.org and quickly became entranced. Food Timeline is a dizzying array of food trivia, all compiled and maintained by a single reference librarian who, it would seem, likes to eat. Let’s go ahead and get the criticism out of the way: it is not the sexiest of websites. The whole thing is an off-putting beige color, over which is a seemingly endless scroll of text. In fact, I’m pretty sure the only target audience (other than me) is the average elementary school child saddled with an interactive social studies report. I know this because the page devoted to presidents is peppered with advice like, “Need to make something for class? How about President Taft’s beloved almond snack?” and “NOTE: boiling fat is very dangerous. Adult supervision is strongly recommended.”

Nevertheless, I find Food Timeline riveting. As might be expected given the privileged, gentlemanly upbringing of our early presidents, there are a more than a few gourmets among the bunch. Jefferson loved bringing the discoveries of his European travels home with him, making his table a cornucopia of French sauces and Dutch waffles and Italian cheeses. Chester A. Arthur brought a French chef with him to Washington. And Dolley Madison, by all accounts, could throw a seriously fab dinner party.

It isn’t that evidence of discriminating gustatory taste makes me think less of these presidents. But far more endearing, I think, are the presidential foods that are commonplace or even rather lowly. Isn’t that one of our mightiest democratic fantasies—the greatness in every man, and an everyman behind greatness? Continue reading →

ABCs of Baking: Cornbread (and Stuffing, Too?)

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corn mealHardly could one find a more emblematic Thanksgiving food than cornbread. It is a “New World” food, a staple of the natives of this continent for centuries, unleavened and cooked over a fire. (I believe that the Little House on the Prairie Cookbook called this form corn pone—an unfortunate name, but still more palatable sounding to me as a child than the recipes for hardtack and headcheese.) But the Europeans couldn’t keep from meddling with the pone any more than they could its cooks, and their eggs and baking powders brought it closer to the cornbread we know today. Long after we’d solidly colonized the cornbread, however, controversy continued to rage, with Southerners preferring a more dense and savory variety, Yankees adding sugar to give it a more muffin-y taste and Midwesterners being too polite to definitively vote either way.

With Thanksgiving close at hand, I could hardly ignore this most complicated and divisive of foods, and I decided to try my hand at my first batch of cornbread stuffing from scratch. First, of course, I needed to bake some cornbread. But with which regional version to cast my lot? Savory seemed right for a stuffing, so I sought out Paula Dean to guide me. I’ll be honest—I’ve never made anything by the Food Network queen of Southern cooking, but I had recently heard an old NPR interview in which she explained how to deep fry an ottoman (“Oh, it’s easy, honey, you just dip it in egg first.”) and it had thoroughly charmed me.

cornbread

Does the color of this batter make me look Irish?

So I dutifully scribbled down the ingredients for her cornbread and stuffing recipes and headed to the grocery store. The store, however, had already been ravaged by pre-Thanksgiving shoppers, and the only variety of self-rising cornmeal they had left was made with white corn. I hemmed and hawed over this. I had had in mind the deep golden color of waves of grain, and I didn’t want my stuffing to look pallid. I was loath to walk to another grocery store, though, and besides, I’m used to being one of the whiter things in this neighborhood, so I grabbed it and headed to the checkout. Continue reading →