CORNBREAD

Occasionally on the farm Momma would run low on cornmeal. It was a staple in her kitchen. Cornbread was always on the dinner and supper table at our house. When cornmeal was low it became my job to shell the corn to take to the miller. 

The corn crib formed part of the boundary around the lot which is how we referred to as the barnyard. It was a small building about twenty feet wide by fifteen feet deep. It had one door secured by an iron hasp made in the farm blacksmith shop.  I would take my place on my knees beside the corn sheller. The device was made of cast iron was mounted on a wooden box which measured about 18 inches wide 12 inches deep and high. The kernels of corn were removed from the cob as you turned the handle. I would shuck the corn before I shelled it.  When I had about fifty pounds of corn shelled Daddy and I would take it to the mill. It was Shinburg Mill on Hard Labor Creek in McCormick County. The miller was a man named Shepard. I never knew his first name. Everyone called him "Shep". He was shorter and older than my dad and sort of pudgy. He had almost white hair which was thinning on top. Mr. Shep always looked like he had bit into a green persimmon. That sour expression stayed on his face. Once Shinburg Mill was powered by water power from the creek but I remember it powered by a Ford tractor. We did not have to pay for Mr.Shep to grind the corn into cornmeal, he took his tole, a small amount of meal, for payment. We did not have the corn ground into grits which are really just coarsely ground corn. Maybe because we had yellow corn for cornmeal and always ate white grits. You could make corn into hominy to eat without grinding it.  It took a lot of work because the corn kernels had to be soaked in water with lye to make them swell up and then the husk had to be removed by hand.  It was then cooked and served for dinner. I like grits better and they're easy to fix, just add twice as much water as grits to a pot and cook until soft.  I could not wait for supper that night. Momma would bake a big hoecake of cornbread in her big iron skillet. That hot cornbread would be buttered and crumbled into bowls of cold buttermilk. I could hardly wait. We only ate yellow cornbread but my great granddaddy, Eldridge Dorn, would only eat white cornbread. He had a special corn patch just for white. And we never put sugar in cornbread. 

I don't know exactly where cornbread came from. Some say the term "hoecake" for a small cornbread cake comes from the African-American slaves who baked it on the old plantations. In my life I've used a hoe a lot but have been unable to determine how you can bake cornbread on one. The Europeans don't eat cornbread. Only the Italians eat any corn and that's in the form of polenta.  In most of Europe corn is only used as food for animals.There is a story told about how the Americans sent the starving French after WWII a ship full of corn. They let it rot. They wouldn't eat it. I think the Native-Americans invented cornbread.* They cultivated corn, had mortar and pestle to grind it and fire to bake it. I think my Scots-Irish ancestors got cornbread from the Cherokee Indians in the backcountry of South Carolina in the early eighteenth century. 

And I still love it today, but I don't have to shell the corn any more. 

*After I wrote this I found that Wikipedia verified my speculation about the origin of cornbread.