My friend’s mother, Miss Sylvia, is making cornbread. Her house is alive with the smell. The seventy-two-year old woman cooks cornbread the old-fashioned way. An iron skillet in the oven. Lots of butter.
Sylvia tests the hot bread by poking it with a broom bristle. If the bristle is gummy, she licks the bristle then returns the skillet to the oven. If not, it’s Cornbread-Thirty.
I watch this bristle maneuver. She breaks a piece of straw from her broom. And I don’t want to ask, but I have to.
“Is that broom clean?” I say.
“Relax,” Sylvia says. “It’s just one bristle.”
“But is it clean?”
“Define clean.”
“Has it been used to sweep your floor?”
“This particular broom? Yes.”
“Your dusty, residential, hepatitis-C floor?”
“Yes.”
So this cornbread is contaminated and will probably kill me. But then, I’m a dinner guest, I HAVE to eat it even though the old woman’s floors are frequently used by a family dog who is nicknamed “Egypt” because wherever he goes he makes little pyramids.
Still, I love cornbread. I was raised on
the stuff, just like everyone else in America.
My mother used to make cornbread a few times per week. Sometimes more. Primarily because it was cheap, and my family ate cheap food.
You always knew when it was cornbread night because my mother would make a fresh pot of boiling bacon grease with a few navy beans floating in it. She called it bean and ham soup, but I call it cardiac arrest stew.
Either way, you would use your bread to sop the sides of the bowl. Occasionally, while doing this you would get so giddy that you’d break into song and sing a number from “Oklahoma,” “The Music Man,” or in extreme cases “Jesus Christ Superstar.”
All my life, I considered cornbread to be the fingerprint of a good cook. No two cooks make it alike, and I…