This is the last day of my Mountain Flavors class and I’m sad to see it end. I’ve made new friends and had so much fun teaching them about the foodways of Appalachia. Having the help of my good friend and neighbor Carolyn was icing on the cake.
We’re going to wind up the week with breads.
Tipper
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Tipper,
I so enjoyed the class you and Carolyn taught on Appalachian cooking at the Folk School. I told my family, it was kind of like going to camp and making new friends and being sad to leave! I look forward to doing some canning of jams and pickles at home. I have been waiting on my cream to clabber all week so I could make Carolyn’s butter and your biscuits today!
I have developed me a new recipe for cornbread. A lot of people can’t eat gluten and most cornbread recipes call for self rising cornmeal or for flour. I don’t have a problem with gluten but still decided to try cornbread with no flour at all. I use a cup plain yellow cornmeal and a cup of corn cut right off the cob. I split the rows of kernels before I cut them off and scrape the cob to get all the “milk”. I stir in one large egg and enough buttermilk to make the batter the way I want it. I sometimes add shredded cheeses and diced onion into the batter. Next comes a couple of tablespoons of hot grease from the skillet. I mix together baking powder and salt just as the recipe on the bag calls for but I also add baking soda too because of the buttermilk. I add these at the end after I have added the hot grease so that it batter doesn’t rise before I can get it into the oven. I use a nonstick skillet that is oven safe and bake it at 450º until it is brown on top.
I use a nonstick skillet only because my recipe takes the seasoning off of my cast iron. I don’t know what is in it that causes it but I like the bread enough to make it in a nonstick skillet until I can figure it out. Any ideas would be appreciated!
PS: I call the recipe Double Cornbread or Corny-Cornbread.
You are a cornbread innovator, Ed! What a great idea, and the results sound delicious!
I’m so glad you’ve enjoyed the class and your students, Tipper – I’m sure they had a great week and are going home with “new” recipes to make in their own kitchens. After reading this post I’m kind of wishing I’d made cornbread today, but it’s been in the 90s and I didn’t want to use the oven!
PS: Thank you for taking us to cooking school with you!
I’ve made my share of cornbread and biscuits using several different recipes for each one. I prefer white cornmeal for cornbread using plain meal so I add my own salt and baking powder. I prefer plain flour for biscuits, even unbleached if I can find it. I like buttermilk for both cornbread and biscuits and always add a little sugar to make the buttermilk happy.
Baking soda make buttermilk happy. They get together and make lots of little CO2 bubbles which causes the bread to rise. That makes me happy too!
You have me wanting a fried apple pie whether it is fried or not. My one apple tree has lots of apple’s at present. I brought in about 18 windfalls from the thunderstorms the other day. Nearly all of them had some kind a worm damage and some were very small but I worked them up anyway.
I am glad you have enjoyed your class and made new friends.
Tipper,
Years ago, when I was just a little thing, Mama use to make Chocolate Gravy. We called it “Lickem” (cause we would lick our plates after we were finished. That way Mama didn’t have to scrub ’em very much to get them clean. As she would get us a gallon jug for us to fill with strawberries, I’d hear her say “don’t forget to take the dogs with youn’ze to keep the snakes off!” We took the whole family of Fiests with us. There was Copper and Cricket, (the daddy and mama), and Jack and Bob (the sons). If they found a Copperhead, they were like Indians circling a wagon
train. When that ole Copperhead was about to strike, one of the dogs on the opposite side would pounce on him, and that’s all there was to it. They’d sling the stuffings out of him. I sure wish they were here today. I don’t know if they liked “snake killing” better or posseums that tried to bother our hens, trying to roost in the laurels at night, but they got the job done. …Ken
My friend used to buy a square of cornbread when we visited the cafeteria at work. It was about 2 or 3 inches thick and very pale. She said it was sweet, making it look and taste more like a cake than cornbread. It didn’t look like any cornbread I had ever seen. The picture in this post looks like the bread I make in my cast iron skillet.
Mama made biscuits like Grannie’s. She would roll the biscuit around and keep tucking it under till it was perfect. I have tried to do it and can produce a biscuit that way but they’re not like mama’s. the texture was different–they were tender but didn’t fall apart when split like mine tend to do.
Congratulations on a wonderful week! I wanted to sign up for this class so badly, but due to some health issues that needed to be taken care of the same week as the class, I was unable to sign up. I sure hope you have the class again!
Cheryl- I wish you could have taken it too! I’ll be teaching the same class in August of 2020 🙂