A Love Affair With Southern Cooking_ Recipes and Recollections - Jean Anderson [151]
Right up until World War Two, many southern cooks baked fresh bread for breakfast, dinner, and supper—usually biscuits or corn bread. But for special occasions there might be batter bread, sweet potato rolls, or Sally Lunn. Whatever the bread, it was given place of pride at the table.
My mother, transplanted to the South several years before I was born, made superb yeast breads but her particular favorite was yeast-free Boston brown bread, which she steamed in recycled Rumford baking powder tins. The rattle of those cans in Mother’s big enamel kettle is a sound I’ll never forget.
I didn’t share Mother’s passion for Boston brown bread. What I craved were the fresh-baked biscuits and corn breads nearly everyone else in our Raleigh neighborhood ate several times of day. Of course nearly everyone else was southern born and bred.
Our round-the-corner neighbor, Mrs. Franklin, taught me how to make skillet corn bread and corn pone when I was in grammar school, explaining that for really good corn bread, I’d have to get some stone-ground meal from Lassiter’s Mill clear across town. Mother indulged me although she never really cared for corn bread herself.
I didn’t taste hush puppies until I was in high school, and I couldn’t wait to try them at home. Ignoring Mrs. Franklin’s advice, I used granular supermarket cornmeal, and the hush puppies shattered the second they hit the deep fat. I didn’t perfect the recipe until years later when I was writing The Doubleday Cookbook.
Corn breads continued to fascinate me during my growing-up years and became a near obsession while I was at Cornell; they were practically unheard of in Upstate New York. In a surge of culinary evangelism, I made corn breads the subject of my experimental cookery thesis and got an A. I still have that thesis, snug in its brown binder, and I refer to it now and then. Even today, the information remains rock-solid.
Fortunately, stone-ground cornmeal, both white and yellow, is more widely available than it was during my childhood (see Sources, backmatter). My own competence has improved, too; I now make batter bread without trepidation. Ditto crackling bread, hush puppies, and half a dozen other southern classics.
I’ve also developed a light touch with biscuits (thanks to Cornell food chemistry courses) and I bake them as often as I dare using lard, the southern shortening of choice. But they’re off-limits whenever I’m trying to shed the pounds that recipe-testing inevitably packs on.
In the pages that follow, you’ll find an authentic assortment of some of the South’s best breads—everything from Wild Persimmon Bread to Sweet Potato Biscuits to yeasty, high-rising Sally Lunn to Hush Puppies and Cracklin’ Bread.
Most are easy, many are quick—just what you need to complete a proper southern meal.
BLACK WALNUT BREAD
MAKES A 9 × 5 × 3-INCH LOAF
Not so long ago whole families would head for the woods to gather black walnut windfalls; my father, brother, and I often did on crisp autumn days. Finding black walnuts was fun; shelling them and extricating the sweet nut meats wasn’t, but we persisted. As I’ve said many times, my mother wasn’t a southern cook but she was a collector of southern recipes, among them this black walnut bread. It was one of the few southern recipes that she actually made. Sometimes she’d substitute wild hickory nuts for black walnuts; there was a tall hickory tree just outside our front door. If Mother had neither black walnuts nor hickory nuts on hand, she’d use pecans from the two pecan trees in our backyard. Note: It’s no longer necessary to gather your own black walnuts; you can order them online (see Sources, backmatter).
1½ cups sifted all-purpose flour
¼ cup sugar
½ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon ground cinnamon