The Cornbread Gospels Read Online Free

sometimes eaten raw. “Johnny Reb fought the Yankees for four years on rations composed mainly of cornbread and beef. There were, to be sure, admixtures now and then of field peas … of flour, pork, potatoes, rice, molasses, coffee, sugar, and fresh vegetables, though it was for the last that the soldiers always suffered most. But (corn) meal … was the staple fare,” wrote Bell Irvin Wiley in The Life of Johnny Reb: The Common Soldier of the Confederacy.
    War and defeat impoverished the South. Postwar reconstruction was a long, slow process. The South, at least certain pockets of it, continued to live close to the bone for a long, long time, even after the ghosts of the Civil War had faded to a whisper elsewhere in the country. When I first moved to the Ozarks, in 1972, a lot of the older natives were still alive. One, who’d been young in the late 1920s, told me that when the Depression hit seventy-some years after the end of the Civil War, “Hell, we didn’t know the difference … we’d always been depressed.”
    But here’s the thing—the magic of the South, human resilience, and, yes, cornbread—he didn’t sound in the least depressed in the way we use the word now. He sounded proud , as so often do those who survive hard times.
    Slowly, cornbread’s character in the South began to change. Gradually, times began to get better, and cornbread’s associations began tobecome positive. As cornbread became a chosen food, not just the only option, its inherent goodness shone through. It became enriched with the occasional egg or fat or buttermilk; other dishes became available to eat with it, and it was not eaten raw, nor baked in leaves and ash, but cooked in a skillet, in an oven. The rough past began to glow. Cornbread was good, and so was pride in the accomplishment of not only surviving, but surviving well, despite long odds. In 1988, Bob Lancaster wrote in the Arkansas Times that Southerners could “make a filling, gratifying supper out of cornbread and not much else. Forgive the nostalgia, but my mother did it at least a thousand times—and I didn’t come along until after the hard times. Cornbread and sweet milk—with a green onion on the side in season. If I had thought about it, which I don’t recall ever having done, I would have supposed that this was a meal for the privileged rather than the poor, and I would have been right.”
    He would have been, but “a meal for the privileged and the poor” is closer to the truth. When diners at Dairy Hollow House folded back the napkin lining the restaurant breadbasket and found cornbread, there were almost always audible cries of delight, and cornbread stories. (This was one of the moments at which, daily, I began to hear over and over the magic words I began this book with: “Cornbread? I love cornbread!”) Gradually, I believe, the locals who had at first scoffed at us for serving so homey a food in a high-priced restaurant came to see the point. Something like: Yes, this is what we eat, and people are coming here to visit our place, to see what makes us us . Yes, cornbread’s what you serve your people, but it’s more than good enough for those high-falutin’ strangers, too … probably a hell of a lot better than what they got at home. Imagine them not knowing cornbread! They finally have sense to appreciate what we knew all along!
    What we eat develops from the physical and human environments, an inextricable convergence. Every bite, whether we know it or not, is a word in the ongoing story of the world: place, people who live there, choice, accident, history—good and bad, easy and hard. That’s life; that’s food. Love, pride, strong opinions; sustenance, survival; celebration, war and peace, division and healing: this is the true delicious conundrum and communion in every satisfying bite of Southern cornbread, one universal telling of the cornbread gospel.

    ·M·E·N·U·
    D INNER AT THE I NN :
D AIRY H OLLOW H OUSE D AYS
    Oven-Roasted