Flashback

I think the thing I like so much about last week’s cornbread recipe is that it’s a kind of microcosm of Old Southern eating. It’s a Southern food greatest hits list, really: corn meal, fresh corn, buttermilk and of course pork. It’s easy to image Southern poor folk or soldiers cooking up something very much like it. And in fact they did. Cakes of corn meal mush (porridge) fried up with bits of pork fat were called “cracklin’ bread”. It’s popular in the South to this day.

The only thing that’s really missing is whiskey. But you know, that’s not a tough problem to fix.