Who wants to say the blessing?

On Southern food: I never met a cornbread I didn't like

My friend Genevieve has never been to the South of the US, but one thing she knows about it is its famed cuisine. She mentioned fried green tomatoes, mint juleps and fried chicken.

When I think of Southern food, probably the first thing I think of is breakfast food, which thankfully we can all eat any time of day.

To go with breakfast, you gotta have a humble cup of brewed coffee and maybe a bit of creamer if you’re feeling fancy. Then I think of my Aunt Sharon’s townhouse in Atlanta. The mornings are the same when I visit; I walk into her kitchen where a pot of hot coffee brews next to a dainty tea cup. She leaves the organic half and half out, and I help myself. Originally from Michigan, my Aunt embodies southern hospitality in the way she takes care of people. It’s not really about where you’re from.
It wasn’t until I learned about coffee consumption in other parts of the world that I understood the uniqueness of US coffee culture. Oh, the ways we consume it! The range of coffee pots: the industrial ones that steam away night and day at gas stations and the little tiny black coffee percolators for individual serves in hotel rooms.

I think of plastic creamers full of artificial and synthetic flavors, of iced coffee in plastic cups and straws, the cream, coffee and ice swirling together to create a delightful dizzying unsustainable headrush. A country full of contradictions, America has cheap fast hot coffee ready for your cupholder, but it’s also home of Starbucks, overpriced and over-the-top. I used to love to get an iced venti caramel Frappuccino light, with whip cream on top.

My friend Laura and I ritually get Starbucks.

I’ll go into health care another day, but America’s cheap and prolific fast food chains combined with our massive serving sizes explain some of our infamous health issues and also our tendency to transport the worst of our culture abroad.
Southerners specifically have a reputation for loving butter, salt, sugar, sweet tea, soft drinks in Styrofoam cups as big as our heads and all kinds of other terrible wonderful things.
My family did not fit these stereotypes. Mom tended not to cook with real butter and while we did have soft drinks in the house, they were diet, caffeine free and Food Lion brand, ha. My Grandad died of a heart attack when I was young; my parents were cautious about fat and cholesterol. Mom went light on the salt too, but there was always Texas Pete hot sauce on the supper table for Dad. We weren’t complete health nuts, we ordered pizza once a week. I recall my complex relationship with the tub of ice cream in our freezer. I loved it so much, but as a teenager I agonized over how much to serve myself. Compared to a lot of my friends’ pantries, our diet was strict. No chips, no Little Debbie Cakes, not a Cocoa Puff nor pop tart in any cupboard.
Then again I remember the day my Papa on my Mom’s side changed my life with the slab of butter he put on my biscuit at a family brunch. I had never seen butter used so liberally. The biscuit butter combo melted in my mouth, heaven on earth. Since then my relationship with real butter has flourished. It makes everything taste better, and I love to use it in mac’n’cheese, breads, mushroom fry ups and basically everything I cook with. When in doubt I add a hunk of butter.
I love my butter, but I’ve been a vegetarian since I was 14. Sitting with my friend at the Gourmet Shop in Five Points, Columbia, South Carolina, I couldn’t bring myself to finish a chicken salad croissant. I gave up meat because it seemed rebellious and cool. Sadly there was no higher moral grounds for environmentalism or animal rights, that would come later. My family kindly adapted to my new diet with no objection. I still ate fish until I was 18, making home meals manageable for my Mom. She made a lot of salmon patties and tuna casserole. A South Carolinian quitting meat in 2002 was probably less common than it is today, but I survived. I made vegetarian friends who introduced me to exciting new foods like hummus, guacamole and wasabi. I ate a lot of grilled cheese sandwiches.

Somewhere in Louisiana, 2017

An embarrassing part of my young adulthood was a particular fast food obsession with the yellow-glowing, 24-hour cheap and cheerful diner, an emblem to many of quintessential American South. Every Waffle House has the exact same building, branding and layout, high counter tables and low booths. At each table lays large, laminated, sticky menus. These menus have been offering the same thing for as long as I can remember, and you can get a day’s worth of greasy terrible wonderful calories for under ten bucks. Also known as WaHo, the Awful Waffle (rude) and probably “a last resort” among many hungry travelers at 2am, Waffle House is there for you when everything else is closed. A few years ago singer Jane Kramer happened to write a great song about Waffle House. Coincidentally she attended my alma mater. I love this delicious medley of place, storytelling, music, and food.
”I like my man just like I like my breakfast, to fill up my plate if you know what I mean.”

Writer and photographer Micah Cash had a beautiful piece in The Bitter Southerner on Waffle House.
”If you identify as Southern, in some capacity that yellow sign is a part of your life. It simultaneously represents the comfort of a two-egg breakfast served with hospitality and local charm as it does the rich diversity of the South and its melting pot of cultures,” Cash writes.
While at college, I gained an unfortunate reputation for getting drunk and then begging the most sober person around to drive me to Waffle House at 4am. I’m a little ashamed to write this now, not because of the understandable desire for smothered/covered/diced hash browns after dark, but more that I revealed my voracity to my dormmates at that ungodly hour. I hate asking people for rides, although I’ve accepted I’ll have to do it for the rest of my life. The Waffle House workers on Tunnel Road in Asheville, North Carolina saw me plenty. I used to ask the wait staff if they had any Waffle House poster that I could stick on my dorm room door. If everyone was going to make fun of me for my hankerings, I wanted to own the joke.
Memories of food are often connected to place, culture and relationships. It was at a Waffle House on Jones Bridge Road in Atlanta, Georgia in 2009 where I last saw my Uncle Pete. We met up for my birthday, and it had been a while since I’d seen him. I can’t remember what we ate but I’m sure I took advantage of the endless coffee. We sat at a booth and he passed a card across the table to me, filled with wrinkled dollars of different values, twenties, tens, fives and maybe even ones. It was late summer in Georgia, early in the day. I was about to leave the city, and I don’t remember which way I was going. Kentucky? North Carolina? South Carolina? He and I talked for over an hour about many things including how we both struggled sleeping. Later that year he took his own life, and for years to follow and even now I rehash that morning with him. I hope he knew I wanted to see him because I loved him. I hope he didn’t think it was about birthday money.
Food is interesting to think about because it so much more than what’s on the table.

Last night I attempted to make yet another Aussie cornbread. Every time I make it, it’s never as good as while in the States, because of the lack of proper cornmeal over here. Australia tends to have only polenta, a coarser version of the flour. That means the bread tastes grittier and thicker. Last night I made it in a regular pan, not a cast iron skillet (sacrilege). This time it turned out okay; it was fluffy, acceptable. I used more flour and less polenta.
I served last night’s cornbread with chili. For dessert I gave our guests a taste of molasses on the cornbread, which might seem weird if you didn’t grow up with it. Cornbread comes with plenty of side stories. I’ve read that traditionally, southern black folks make it with sugar, southern white folks less so. I’ve had it both ways growing up; I never met a cornbread I didn’t like. For dessert we used to put molasses on it. Molasses might be a southern experience too; I’m not sure. My Dad loved getting ours from a bbq place called Jimmy Diemers in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Growing up I never knew what it was made of, but I took a class in college called Appalachian Music and Dance. Our professor took us to a “Molasses stir off” where people hung out outside all night, dancing, feasting and playing fiddles and banjos. Central to the party was a massive vat of bubbling boiling green sorghum/sugar cane juice. The vat tilted up and down until the liquid simmered off by night’s end. It became that strong strange sweet sticky thick black stuff that some of us know so well.

My Gran passed away in 2020, during the pandemic, and I couldn’t leave Australia for the funeral. I tried to make hot water cornbread in her honor. Different from the more traditional cornbread my Mom made us growing up, Gran’s was simpler. It called for cornmeal, salt and boiling water, Mix those together and then fry dough balls of it it in vegetable oil. When I spent my summers in Bowling Green, I’d go over to her house and watch her make it and then help her and Papa eat it. They’d have it with home grown tomatoes and beans from their garden, a lunch of locavore delights. If there was any hot water cornbread left at the end of the meal, Gran saved it for Papa the next day. He’d have it with cold milk. Did he even like to eat it with buttermilk?! They never had leftovers when I came over though.
Well folks, it’s getting pretty late, and my Substack’s getting pretty long. I’m just getting going. Stories of food are more than recipes. By sharing meals and the stories behind them, we break barriers as we break bread.
Now who wants to say Grace? ;)