Cornpone Walking

“If God had meant for cornbread to have sugar in it, he would have called it cake.” — Ronnie Lundy from Shuck Beans, Stack Cakes, and Honest Fried Chicken: The Heart and Soul of Southern Country Kitchens

You can put in baking powder. You can put in cracklings. You can even add jalapenos and bake it in a muffin tin.

But whatever you do, don’t you dare put sugar in my cornbread!

As an Appalachian citizen, I feel I have every right to set down some rules for my region’s national dish. Corn and Appalachians go back to the very first Appalachians — the Indian tribes that farmed, foraged and hunted the mountains of Virginia and the rest of the Blue Ridge.

I won’t, however, tell the good people of the Bayou that they can’t eat cake masquerading as cornbread with their spicy gumbos. Neither will I presume to tell the Hillbillies of Tuscany (to their faces, anyway) that polenta is almost, but not quite, as good as a cornpone cooked in a cast-iron skillet and slathered in fresh country butter.

In the Southern Appalachians, a sack of corn meal and a sack of pinto beans have sometimes been all we possess, so cornbread defines us, and in turn, we define it. Individuality is part of that definition, whether a mountaineer leavens cornpone with baking soda or eggs, it belongs to us all.

Even the word cornpone, according to Appalachian Home Cooking author Mark Sohn, came from the native Appalachians, who called it “apone” or “apan.” They passed it on to white Appalachians, along with every other knowledge we needed to survive in these mountains.

Sohn says, rightly I believe, that corn is like manna to my people, and the tribal legends from around the world of the creation of corn support this view. Made with bacon grease or lard, fried in butter or baked in ashes, cornbread nourishes.

In the days after the American Revolution, corn and cornbread were a daily symbol of independence from the wheat-loving British. One hundred years later, the great improvers of the so-called “Progressive Era” tried to shame mountain people into eating only biscuits.

Elizabeth Engelhardt explains in her Cornbread Nation 3: Foods of the Mountain South (Cornbread Nation: Best of Southern Food Writing) essay “Beating the Biscuits in Appalachia: Race, Class, and Gender Politics of Women Baking Bread“ how turn-of-the-century progressivists May Stone and Katherine Pettit worked to purge cornbread from the kitchens of families living along the forks of Kentucky’s Troublesome Creek.

“The biscuit, in other words, marked middle- and upper-class status in 1900,” according to Engelhardt. Cornbread was a mark of poverty.

Eventually, Appalachians did adopt the biscuit, and even in my mind improved it. But we have never forsaken the simple cornpone.

Cornbread has sustained the mountain people of the Southeast through the frontier days and the Great Depression. It went with us to cities like Detroit and Cincinnati during the diaspora, when many Hillbillies left the land and the coal mines for urban tenements and factories.

Cornbread, you see, is about salt, not sugar. It’s about crust, not tender crumb. It tells a sometimes hard story of poverty and suffering, of ceaseless labor and the prejudices of outsiders. But it will soak up a potlikker and melt in your mouth, too.

There are few things that taste as good to me as my granny’s beef roast shredded into a bowl of its own au jus and sopped up with cornbread. Few memories are as sweet as my popaw before bedtime smiling as he ate buttermilk and cornbread at the kitchen table. And no other aroma calls me home like a thick yellow batter baking in black iron.

You can eat cathead biscuits with soup beans, if that’s all the bread you’ve got. But it won’t be as good as soup beans sopped up with a crusty wedge of cornpone. Neither will greens or fried potatoes, or even venison stew, reveal their best qualities without the foil of good cornbread.

Americans are corn walking, write’s America’s current food conscience Michael Pollan. But Appalachians are cornpone walking.

Try this recipe for my version of the Appalachian cornpone, adjusted for modern tastes. Of course, you want to be really traditional, mix plain meal with water and bake on a hoe blade set in the coals of a long-burning fire.

Tags: Appalachian history, cornbread, cornmeal, cornpone