Musings: Food Ways

~by Mark Blackwell

There is a character in a Mark Twain story who states,“You tell me whar a man gits his corn pone, en I’ll tell you what his ’pinions is.” There is some truth to that. Most people don’t want to jeopardize their jobs or their standing in the community by holding unpopular opinions.

For those of you who might not know, corn pone is a kind of cornbread. It starts with a batter of white corn meal, buttermilk, eggs, salt, baking powder and a little flour. It can be fried in a pan like pancakes or baked in a cast iron skillet. The notable features of the fixins are buttermilk, white corn meal, and no sugar.

I bring this up because this particular recipe is identified as southern cornbread. It’s what I grew up eating. And for quite a while, I believed that it was the only cornbread there was.

I confess to spending some of my formative years in northern Indiana and that is where I first tasted the sweet or northern variety.

This was my gastronomical awakening to the fact that there was such a thing as regional cuisines. Spending some years up north, however, did not alter my family’s core menu of foods or how they should be cooked— generally fried, overcooked, and seasoned with bacon grease.

Another thing that sparked this contemplation about food was listening to a feller on the radio telling a story about not being able to get grits at a restaurant in the south. It was an event of such import that he interpreted it as a sign of the end-times.

Anyone who has traveled south of Louisville and stopped at any kind of eatery knows that as far as grits are concerned there are only two options: plain or cheese. None is not an option! I learned this first-hand on one of my first southern sojourns.

You do not ask about the possibility of substituting hash browns for grits. The one and only time I did was in a little greasy spoon somewhere in the south. The waitress came over and with a voice and accent that you could pour over pancakes, asked, “What can I get for you, hun?” I ordered a cup of coffee, couple of eggs over medium, with a slab of Virginia ham. The waitress then sweetly informed me that breakfast came with grits and asked if I want plain or cheesy. That’s when I made my ignorant Yankee faux pas.

Her sweet demeanor took an immediate leave of absence and she looked at me like I had just inquired about getting an order of par-boiled horse hockey. She called over her shoulder to the cook behind the grill, saying there was somebody out here asking about hash browns. The cook didn’t even look up, he just said, “I don’t do hash browns, we got grits—both ways.”

I have been thinking about how food ways are like folk ways in that they define where we live and to some extent who we are. Which brings up the question of what makes Brown County special, food-wise?

One way to investigate what people do and why they do it is to study migration patterns; in other words, find out where they came from. Indiana has been called the northern-most southern state. And I believe it, because the preponderance of pioneers to the state were Scots-Irish who up came from the south.

You can hear echoes of the south in our hoosier twang. Photographs of Brown County folks and their homesteads, taken a century ago, are practically indistinguishable from pictures of Appalachia. And along with their accents, the early settlers brought their culinary preferences.

As soon as possible, the settlers planted gardens consisting of corn, beans, onions, and cabbages. They brought along milk cows and chickens. Apple orchards were established. Wild game and fish were abundant as well as foraged nuts, berries, and greens. There was no shortage of food but what was in short supply were those things that make food taste better. Things like pepper, spices, and especially sugar.

I figure that’s why the southern settlers worked out recipes that didn’t call for much sweetening. It was also a good way to use buttermilk. But a later wave of migration brought folks of German ancestry in from the eastern states of Pennsylvania and Ohio. And those folks brought their own food ways.

I know the first thing I think of when I think about German-American food is sauerkraut. It is easy to prepare, easy to store and pretty tasty. And the same can be said about their sausages. But what I think of most are the desserts. Apple strudel, doughnuts, and stollen—all made with sugar.

I figure maybe those were the folks who first put sugar in their cornbread. I do know that we are lucky to live here in a beautiful Brown County where we can have both kinds of cornbread or even fried biscuits. They’re all good with apple butter.