It took Shelby Foote 25 years to master the Civil War. It took him twice as long to master corn bread.
"You would think something so simple would be easy, but it isn't," says the author in that familiar voice you could melt over hoe cakes. "I was raised on corn bread, and I've been making it all my life, but it wasn't until 10 years ago that I found a recipe that pleased me. I like the top to be crunchy and as thin as newsprint; I'm very particular about it."
That figures. After all, he's a Southerner, and nobody is as particular about corn bread as a Southerner.
Grits are funnier. Barbecue is more colorful. But corn bread, in all its crumblitudinous forms, may be the South's most characteristic food.
When it comes to bread, people down here are a species apart -- hominy sapiens, you might say. For reasons both cultural and culinary, we are prone to pone.
The numbers bear it out. Martha White Foods of Nashville, the nation's leading seller of cornmeal, estimates that 80 percent of the corn bread made in the United States is made in the South (including Texas). A lot of the rest is no doubt cooked by expatriates. We make it in tins, pans, fryers, waffle irons, souffle dishes, cast-iron skillets.
We eat it with buttermilk, butter beans, catfish, potlikker, sorghum syrup, fried chicken. We call it pone, dodgers, fritters, ash cakes, hoe cakes, hush puppies.
There are no statistics on this, but cornmeal must account for at least 10 percent of the weight of your average natural-born Southerner.
The only living creatures that eat more corn surely have hooves.
James Villas, the Georgia-born food editor of Town and Country magazine, understands this affection instinctively. When he saw a recent newspaper article about a Southern-style restaurant opening in Southampton, N.Y., one detail stopped him cold: The menu did not include "our beloved corn bread," as he calls it. A Southern restaurant without corn bread? You might as well have an Italian place without pasta.
"I have no intention of going," Villas says. "I guess they think it's fattening."
Or maybe they were leery of corn bread's mystical powers to provide comfort.
"Corn bread is an aphrodisiac. Did you know that?" says Janice Sikes of the Auburn Avenue Research Library, who's gathering recipes for a project on black family cooking. "Corn bread excites me. My grandmother in Mississippi used to make these wonderful cakes. I'd leave her cakes and eat her corn bread - that's how much I love it."
Corn bread is not exclusively Southern, of course. New Englanders have a longstanding devotion to johnnycakes, a griddle bread that must contain flint corn (or so the Rhode Island Legislature decreed). And you can't get more corn-crazy than New Mexicans, who draw on centuries of Native-American rituals and beliefs that revolve around maize. At Santa Fe's Coyote Cafe - the latest thing in Southwestern cuisine - they still pay homage to the oldest thing in Southwestern cuisine; no fewer than five dishes involve cornmeal.
The puzzle is that Midwesterners, who grow more corn than anybody, don't bake it more. There are theories about this having to do with the availability of wheat and the predominance of Germanic settlers used to baking with it. Some people, however, think it has as much to do with perceptions.
"Northerners," Villas says, "tend to look down on corn bread as peasant food."
Indeed, corn bread has long been seen as fodder for po' folks. Two centuries after Indians introduced it to colonists, Mark Twain captured the upper-crust attitude toward corn bread in "Huckleberry Finn." Wheat bread, Huck says, is "what the quality eat - none of your low-down corn pone." (Twain himself knew better; when he listed the things he missed about America during a European tour, one of them was "hot hoecake, Southern style.") There's a flip side to this low-down image. Politicians and writers often have invoked corn bread for that populist touch. Joel Chandler Harris, the fritter-shaped folklorist, wrote that "real democracy and real republicanism ... are the most potent results of cornmeal." Huey Long, making light of his reputation as the potbellied potentate of Louisiana, talked up the virtues of corn pone and "Pot Likker a le Dictator." Big Jim Folsom, running for governor of Alabama, toured the state with a hillbilly band called the Corn Grinders.
Perhaps President Clinton's handlers should consider some corn-bread ops in '96.
It would be nice to report that corn bread has overcome its downscale image and become, like grits, a signature of new Southern cooking. It hasn't quite happened. While you'll find corn bread at stellar Southern restaurants from the Highlands Bar and Grill in Birmingham to Georgia's in Los Angeles, it remains, for the most part, an unglamorous, workhorse sort of food. The places in Atlanta that are known for corn bread - Deacon Burton's with its hoe cakes, Harold's with its cracklin' bread, Mary Mac's with its corn muffins and potlikker - have been known for it since ladies wore white gloves.
Alas, there is no corn bread trend. Quaker Oats, the second biggest seller of cornmeal and makers of the Aunt Jemima brand, has seen flat or declining sales in recent years. Martha White, the market leader, reports modestly growing sales of self-rising mixes and declining sales of old- fashioned cornmeal.
"People don't bake from scratch as much anymore," says marketing manager Pam Sheridan. "Whenever we see a hearse go by, we say, 'There goes another cornmeal customer.' " All of this leads to the inescapable conclusion that corn bread - classic though it is - no longer holds such a central place on Southern tables.
A moment of silence please.
It wasn't always this way. Until the advent of sliced bread in the 1930s, corn bread was so common in the South that most people referred to it simply as "bread."
"Biscuits were biscuits and wheat bread was 'light bread.' But when we said, 'Pass the bread,' we meant corn bread," remembers the writer Will Campbell, who grew up on a Mississippi farm during the Depression.
Like most Southerners of his generation, Campbell never lost his taste for corn bread. When he went away to college at Wake Forest, he crumbled it into his milk in the cafeteria, even though such bumpkin behavior embarrassed his future wife. When he moved to a farm outside Nashville, he planted an acre of Paymaster open-pollinated corn and ground it on a gas-powered grist mill. Did it just the other day. Invited a dozen kids over to watch and play and listen to him read Chaucer's "The Miller's Tale."
"It's good for them to know that cornmeal doesn't grow at the A&P," he says.
Campbell doesn't grind just any meal. He grinds white corn, not yellow. This is a crucial distinction among corn bread connoisseurs.
Northerners and Texans prefer yellow corn bread, but most Southerners east of the Mississippi stand by the pale kernels they knew as children.
"We never used yellow corn when I was growing up in Virginia, and I still don't," says Edna Lewis, the cookbook author and all-around guardian angel of traditional Southern cooking. "White corn has a clear, clean taste that's a little sweeter."
But many others honestly can't taste the difference. "If you blindfolded me, I doubt I could tell them apart," says Linda Carman, Martha White's consumer affairs director. "I just don't like the way yellow corn bread looks. I expect it to be sweet, and I don't want to eat sweet bread with my peas and beans."
Comfort food is like that: In order to work its magic, it has to be just the way we expect and remember it. Nobody likes a disappointing pone. Everyone has some advice on how to avoid that calamity: "You need a cast-iron skillet. It holds the heat better than aluminum," Foote says. "And it has to be hot. If you put an egg in this skillet, it'd jump back at you."
"You've got to make it with stone-ground meal," Campbell says. "That store-bought stuff tastes like sawdust."
"You don't use sugar," Villas says. "You just don't. It's unheard of."
If Villas sounds a little dogmatic, maybe it's because he was raised by a woman who's even more dogmatic. Martha Pearl Villas is such a purist she could be a captain in the Corn Pone Police. One Thanksgiving, Villas recalls, he started to put jalapeno peppers in the corn bread.
"Mother had a fit," he says. "Craig Claiborne was there that night, and he said it didn't seem so bad to him - Texans did it."
"This," Martha Pearl shot back, "isn't Texas."
Last year Villas and his mother wrote a cookbook, "My Mother's Southern Kitchen" (Macmillan, $34.95). As they traveled around the country promoting it, they noticed that people north and south always asked about two things: biscuits and corn bread.
"When you make corn bread for Northerners," Villas says, "they love it."
Children of the corn, there is hope yet.
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