The Cornbread Chronicles

My messy cupboard door -- very handy!

Taped to the inside of a cupboard door in my kitchen is a recipe for buttermilk cornbread. I like that it’s simple, calling only for cornmeal, no flour, and that it uses buttermilk, which I adore, and just before it’s put into the oven the leavens are added – baking soda and baking powder, along with some salt –to, in effect, react with the buttermilk and create an explosion. Then it’s scraped  into the greased, smoking hot cast iron skillet in which bacon has been rendered and put back in the oven for 20 minutes.

I like it in theory, but my family is unimpressed, and so I don’t like it in fact. In spite of the buttermilk/baking soda catalyst, it’s really quite a heavy slab. And, if you heat the pan with bacon in it it’s liable to end up burned to a crisp.  Beyond that, there was something... missing, something not quite right with it.

But after a very interesting, if esoteric, conversation on-line with some food academics about the practice of adding lye to water in which to cure ripe olives; and after I confessed that several years ago I used Drano (a new, unopened can) as the lye in question and never had I tasted more buttery olives; and after I began to think about how lye or other such esoteric ingredients are used in other food processes, I had an aha moment about that cornbread.

Note: Lye, the result of filtering water through wood, or other ashes, is also called potash (as a matter of curiosity, Samuel Hopkins, of Pittsford, was granted the first US patent in 1790 for an “improvement in the making of pot ash or pearl ash by a new Apparatus and Process.”), or sodium hydroxide, and is incredibly alkaline, and very caustic. Indeed, it should not be stored in glass bottles because it eats the glass.  Slaked lime can be substituted for lye in some instances.

You see, the reason Mexican cuisine, so heavily based on corn, has proven healthy over the eons is that somehow they learned very early on to soak the corn in, in effect, lye. Mexicans burned sea shells and limestone and added the ashes to the water in which they cooked the corn kernels because they’d found it took off the kernel’s hard-to-digest hulls; and as a revolutionary by-product, as Rick Bayless writes in his book, Authentic Mexican, “... their bodies felt more strength: The corn now gave them more minerals like niacin, more protein at their service, perhaps more calcium. They had made the one nutritionally energizing discovery that could yield a strong race: nixtamalization (from the Nahuatl nextli, ‘ashes’ [and tamal, “dough”]).”

And that brings me to the real underlying unease I had with that cornbread. You like to think that what you put on your family’s table has more going for it than just good taste – you like to think that it is good for them, that it contributes to their well-being.  While, to my mind, bleached white wheat flour has very little going for it, cornmeal, except for being gluten-free, has very little more. But if I were to substitute an energized, nixtamalized  corn product for that cornmeal, wouldn’t I be happier? And so I tried it – substituting 3 to 1 a mixture of masa harina to grits for the cornmeal – and the results were phenomenal!
While some people nixtamalize their own corn, I wasn’t ready for that.

The Ingredients -- cold pan, frozen cracklings, ready to go in the cold oven

I had some Bob’s Red Mill Masa Harina and Corn Grits or Polenta. The masa is very fine, like a flour, and the kernels from whence it comes have been slaked with lime; while the grits are not nixtamalized but are coarse cut, and so contribute texture to the finished cornbread, and texture is always good. And instead of the bacon, I melted half a cup of cracklings (leftover from rendering lard) in the pan.

And perhaps it should be mentioned, I swapped out my old tins of baking powder and baking soda for new. They do wear out, you know.

Although the plain cornbread was too good for words, next time I added about a cup of frozen corn kernels to it, caramelizing them first in a frying pan in the time it took the oven and skillet to heat up. And the time after that I added some chopped jalapenos along with the corn, and sprinkled Cabot cheese over the top. Now, I imagine that a handful of cubed ham would be very nice. Maybe some cumin seeds.

Because this is light, fluffy, moist, robust, crispy-bottomed, ham-fisted cornbread! It’s very accepting. And it’s very forgiving, as I found out one afternoon when I was making it as my contribution to our Sunday Cocktails at Five. I shoved the hot skillet back into the oven, spanked my hands together – job well done! – when my eye lit on the little bowl of leaveners! Yikes! I had forgotten to mix in the baking soda, powder, and salt at the last minute! I stood frozen for a split second, swore, tore open the oven, scraped out the pan into the bowl – all those lovely cracklings no longer on the bottom, cheese on the top, but stirred altogether in with the leaven -- scraped it back into the pan and back into the oven. It was... still VERY good. You can’t ruin this stuff!

This isn't a great photo, but you can see the texture is light and moist, and there's a nice skin on the bottom of the piece on the right. Yum!

Of course I couldn’t leave well enough alone, so I called Maya Zelkin who I knew could tell me something about making masa nixtamalera. I was answered by Maya’s young son, Manolo, who told me his mother was at a pottery show. I was about to say goodbye when I realized that Manolo could probably tell me how it was done. “Oh sure,” he said, “I’ve done it hundreds of times.” It involved, he said, buying big sacks of “I think dried” dent corn, and soaking them “or maybe cooking them” in water with “slaked lime”. Maya told me next day that she boils the corn in the lime water until it’s soft, then let’s it soak overnight.. Next day they rub the skins off the kernels, “but we don’t get anal about it. You can drive yourself crazy that way.” Then she grinds the kernels with a Corona grain grinder into a soft dough from which she makes tortillas. I’d like to try stirring buttermilk and the leavens into it for cornbread. Maya invited me up to participate in this process when the nutziness of the holidays is over and I accepted.

Buttermilk Corn Bread

• 1/3 cup of bacon grease or lard, or ½ cup of cracklings
• 1 egg
• 2 cups buttermilk (you may need more)
• 1 1/4  cups masa harina (5 ounces)
• 1/2 cup grits (3 ounces)
• 1 scant teaspoon baking powder
• 1 scant teaspoon baking soda
• 1 heaping teaspoon salt
• (optional) 1 cup corn kernels, drained; chopped jalapenos to taste; cubed ham; grated cheese; whatever... I think apples might be good...

Put the grease, lard, or cracklings into a cold 10” cast-iron skillet. Put the skillet into a cold oven and set the oven to 450°. (Just because you think I’m lardcore, do. not. skimp on the fat. There is none in the batter, itself, and you have to get some unctuosity in there somehow.)

Whisk the egg and then whisk in the buttermilk. Whisk in the masa and grits. Set aside.

Into a small bowl measure the baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Set aside in a prominent place so you don’t forget them.

Prepare whichever optional ingredients you might choose to use.

When the oven reaches temperature, take the skillet from it and place it on a burner (careful! I leave a potholder draped over the handle to remind myself not to grab it).

Add whatever optional ingredients you desire to the buttermilk/cornmeal mixture. If it’s too stiff stir in a little more buttermilk – it should be thick but stirrable. Add the baking powder/soda/salt mixture to it, mix it all up and pour and scrape the batter into the hot and smoking pan. Sprinkle the cheese over the top if you’re using it, put that hot skillet back into the hot oven and bake for 20 minutes.

That’s it!

Note: While I am talking to Maya I am also making one last batch of plain cornbread. The pan is heating while we talk, and then the pan is ready and I tuck the phone beneath my chin and scrape the buttermilk mixture into it and put it in the oven, set the timer to 20 minutes, talk some more and as we’re saying goodbye I notice the little red bowl of leavens sitting still on the counter! The timer now reads 10 minutes. Too late. Apparently I’m making a big, fat tortilla!

The leavens and salt -- What you should. NOT. FORGET!

***

Yes, I am aware that talking about turkey today would’ve been relevant, but you could always make a cornbread stuffing. Stuff it, shove it in the oven, and it’ll get done in a couple hours. Make your mashed potatoes, your squash, your Brussels sprouts, your pumpkin pie (all locally grown, of course). It will all be delicious if you’re not afraid of salt, butter and fowl fat, and hugs from your relatives and friends – and please don’t be. Enjoy your family, your company, and/or your waiter.  Think what you would like to be able to say on November 25 of 2011, and make it happen in this year in between.

Think hard, now!

Published as my Twice Bitten column in the Rutland Herald 11/22/10

Cabbage Minus Zero

If your dog has an ancient brain, vestigial memory, he will bury a bone and go back one day and dig it up and lie down over it and hold it in his paws and nurse it until it’s gone, licking and sucking and sometimes chawing until it is lace and finally disappears. He buries the bone not so it ferments, not so the earth will make its elements work on each other until they are more available to his digestive system, which is what happens, but because something, a hunch, tells him to. My dog’s ancient brain has been pretty much bred out of him. Nevertheless, he has little or no interest in a fresh bone. If I give him one on June 1^st, he will disdain it, nose it a few times over the next month as it lies in the grass under a hot sun, and finally find real interest in it about the 4^th of July. A winter bone can lie there till hell freezes over and then thaws, at which point he might find it fascinating.

Makes you glad to be a civilized human, doesn’t it? But wait a sec: you pick a cabbage out of the fall garden. It might be sleeting, you might have to lift the protecting blanket and shake the snow off it before you break off the cabbage. Now what? Eat it at ground zero? Probably not. And no, you can’t leave it on your counter or even in your fridge to eat next month, for even if rot doesn’t set in, the quality – the flavor and nutrition of it – will degrade. No, you have to do something with it – immediately, if not sooner. What do you do? Grandma used to cut out the core and shred the cabbage, salt it until it wept, wring it out, and apply a dressing of light cream, vinegar, a little sugar. That’s pretty much ground zero.

Next step is to heat it. I like to put some good amount of butter in the pan (natch!), melt it over low heat, then add the thin wedges of cabbage, salt and pepper, cover it up and leave it over very low heat on a back burner for a long time – an hour, maybe. Turn it once in awhile as the cabbage melts and golds. The long low heat doesn’t excite cabbage’s bitter buds but calms them into sweetness. A touch of vinegar when you eat it.

That’s the way with cabbage. You heat it, it’s a plus, an addition.

Let’s go the other way – don’t heat it, slice it up in slivers and put it to work, encourage it to make the most of its innate self. You’ve heard of sauerkraut? You know how it’s made? Think about it – it’s buried in a crock with salt sprinkled over it, pounded down, weighted, covered, and let work!

The process is called lacto-fermentation, and the key to it is salt, which allows “Lactic microbial organisms – similar to those that curdle milk – to develop spontaneously and convert the natural sugars of the vegetable into lactic acid. This environment rapidly acidifies, to the point that it becomes impossible for bacteria responsible for food spoilage to multiply.” This is from a little book called Preserving Food without Freezing or Canning, put together by The Gardeners & Farmers of Terre Vivante, in France, and published by Chelsea Green in White River. It’s a treasure trove of old techniques of preservation that get left out of modern cookbooks but that were – until quite recently, the middle of the 19^th century when heat sterilization (canning)came into wide use – the prevalent forms of food preservation. They include drying; preserving with salt, oil, sugar, alcohol or vinegar; cold storage, and fermentation.

“Oh, how esoteric,” you might say. But lots of foods we eat everyday take advantage of fermentation. Chocolate, for instance. In an October 29^th New Yorker article called “Extreme Chocolate”, Bill Buford says “Fermentation has been around forever. It is older than cooking. It was probably the first method of food preparation. Fermentation transforms grapes into wine, grains into beer, wheat into leavened bread. It transforms a raw ingredient, often valued for its nutrition, into one valued for its taste. It yields vinegar, yogurt, sauerkraut, cheese, prosciutto, vanilla, and pickles.” Of course, cacao pods are also fermented, a process Buford describes robustly, to yield, finally, the silky bitter thing we call chocolate.

Without undue thought about the matter, I made a couple of small batches of sauerkraut this fall. I was surprised by the sweetness and velvety texture of it, and how well it accompanied roasted or grilled meats. A taste of it alone in the middle of the afternoon proved satisfying, too.

Suddenly, as though my ears had been unstoppered by the doing of it, people were TALKING, in the most ravishing tones, about sauerkraut and the more varied Asian counterpart of it, kimchi, a fermented vegetable mix, usually based on cabbage but with the addition of other vegetables such as carrots and onions. Its spiciness can be scorching or mild with hot peppers, its Asian origin told in notes of ginger or fennel or seeds of cumin, coriander or cardamom. It’s as individual as the maker.

Potter, Maya Zelkin, served kimchi as part of a little spread she put out for her pottery studio opening in Shrewsbury in October. As I nibbled it appreciatively she told me she’d made it from her own garden produce and in a fermenting crock like the one I was at that moment looking at and wondering what that unusual object was. She had taken a fermentation class given by the Flack Family Farm of Enosburg Falls a few years ago at a NOFA (Northeast Organic Farming Association) conference, and based her execution of the crock on one she’d seen there.

The crock holds 2.5 gallons of vegetables, considerably more than I had been making at home, and the covering weight is a halved disk that fits, half by half, through the narrow top to cover the vegetables to weigh them down. “You don’t need a lot of weight,” Maya told me.

A bowl-like top fits upside-down into the lip, or gutter, of the crock, the lip is then filled with water, which creates a seal that allows the fermenting gases to escape but keeps air and dust out and prevents the formation of kahm yeast, that slimy stuff that isn’t harmful but is a little distasteful.

The crock is both beautiful and utilitarian, and suddenly I was a little more excited about making kimchi.

Maya said that I might visit her one day for a kimchi-making session if I would provide the cabbage. We would need 12 pounds, and I arrived in her kitchen a few days later toting just two heads of cabbage, because one of them weighed a humongous 10 pounds! A pot of soup bubbled slowly on the back of the wood range and Maya was prepping ginger, carrots, garlic, onions, and daikon radish to grate, a bowl of sea salt and a package of dried hot pepper stood by, as she handed me a sharp knife and a teensy cutting board and bid me get busy on that cabbage!

As we chopped and grated and chatted, she told me she’d made several batches of kimchi already and stored it in canning jars in a cool spot in the basement.

“Really,” I said, surprised at this, thinking of it as a condiment, “and why do you make so much?”

“As a preserving method, this is just so superior to canned. I realize it’s not good for modern commerce, doesn’t have a long shelf life, but it means I don’t need to buy California greens in February.”

“So we need to be careful,” I said, “or the USDA will decide that lacto-fermented vegetables are dangerous to our health and outlaw them!” We both had a rueful chuckle at that!

As a matter of fact, there is a caution in the Terre Vivante book, saying that “The USDA and the FDA recommend that all fermented foods should also be canned in a hot water bath to protect against botulism,” but they add, “There is good reason to think these recipes are safe without canning.”

We plunged along in our dangerous task.

Much of the big cabbage was revealing itself to be made up of numerous baby cabbages that grew from the same stem and nestled in its structure like babies in a womb. I munched on one and offered one to Maya, which she declined. “I’m not much for raw vegetables,” she explained. “I think traditional cultures didn’t eat a lot of vegetables, except for fermented ones.” She went on to explain, “I think the emphasis on raw salads is really not good for you – after all, we’re not cows!” I looked around and tossed the little half-eaten baby cabbage in the compost.

I’d sliced about a quarter of the cabbage, Maya had a nice pile of grated additions, so we put them into the crock, sprinkled 2 tablespoons of gray sea salt – Maya was using slightly less salt with this batch, 6 tablespoons altogether, for the 15 pounds of vegetables – and a half teaspoon of hot pepper powder on them, and I took the big pounder that had been carved out of a stick of firewood and began to pound.

It wasn’t long before the last layer of vegetables was pounded down. Maya fit each half of the weight on top and pressed them down onto the solid vegetables – the kimchee was juicing up nicely – and fitted an incongruously vivid bowl over the top onto the lip. The original top cracked in the firing, but she found this bowl fit perfectly. Carefully she poured water into the lip. “This was the first fermenting crock I made, and the lip is a little shallow, so I refined it in the following ones. But this is good enough for me.” Too, this crock was the smaller of the two sizes she makes, holding 1.5 gallons of vegetables, a size she finds most useful for her needs.

The task completed, we cleaned up and I gathered my things to go. “Come back in three days,” she bade me. “It should be done by then.”

My mouth was agape. Three days! “Oh, yes,” she crowed. “Bring some canning jars.”

Sure enough, three days later I returned home with my jars of delectable, juicy, sweet and spicy kimchi.

The following Saturday I bought daikon, carrots, cabbage, onions and a bulb of fennel at the Winter Farmers’ Market at the Rutland Area Food Co-op, and made a small batch of kimchi for myself. Of course I didn’t have Maya’s fermenting crock, but I could get along with a small crock I did have, my little coffee-cup plate to cover it, liter jar full of water to weight it, and a cheesecloth covering. It’s been two weeks now, and my small batch of kimchi is beginning to taste pretty good. It’s a little dry, I think because of evaporation, but quite tasty. But I’m thinking that when Maya gets back to making pots again next spring I might have to splurge on my own Zelkin fermenting crock!

Preserving fall vegetables might seem a little off-season for a December column, but the mind-blowing success of the indoor Winter Farmers’ Market puts the lie to that thought! When the prospect of a winter market began to take hold last summer, farmers began to plan for fall and winter crops. So far their planning has been fruitful, and the market is bursting with produce. Talking to Sally Beckwith of Foggy Meadow Farm last Saturday, I learned that the cabbages are still in the ground, picked at opportune moments during the week, and have probably benefited appreciably, as the parsnips have done, by the nip of raw weather making them sweeter. The spinach, though not actively growing, has roots still securely in the ground waiting, with no loss of freshness, to be picked and sold at the market.

Fresh or fermented, even cooked – never have our food choices been so broad, so festively presented. Why, I feel as instinctively happy as a dog with a fresh juicy bone in its jaws, just beginning to dig a hole to bury it in!

Potter/artist, Maya Zelkin Pottery, wood fired stoneware and porcelain, Coldham Road, Shrewsbury, VT 05738, 802/492-2045 or mayazelkin@gmail.com

published in Rutland (Vt) herald December 4, 2007