Joy! Meditations on Lent, Illness, Cooking and Other Lenten Pasttimes

Hello, blog pals,

Well, I've spent the last few days being sick!

CARAVAGGIO,Sick Bacchus. 1593 Oil on canvas, 67 x 53 cm, Galleria Borghese, Rome


I have a problem that probably emerged from traumas of my childhood--a time when I was sick a lot. Health was a rare flower in a childhood landscape of seriously yucky days and feverish nights. I learned all the varieties (well, many of them, anyway) of illness. One after another I had all the usual 1940's and 50's childhood suspects, plus some of the not so usual ones, all topped off in 1954 with a bout of polio. I was in that last generation of polio-afflicted kids; but that's story for another time.

The residue of that time has been a little bit of an inability on my part to trust my adult body when it's trying to let me know I'm sick. I generally put whatever symptoms I may have down to some kind of hypochondria...until it's too late and I find myself really really sick. (Reminds me of something I read somewhere yesterday, where someone said something like this: "My wife's hypochondria is complicated by her sickness.") That's what happened this time.

After an exhausting Shrove Tuesday (when every year I cook pancakes for my church community--with lots of help, but still, I do the shopping, the prep, and the actual flapjack flipping--this year for upwards of a hundred folks--lots of fun but a very very long day) followed by the Wednesday of Ashes.

Ash Wednesday always starts early for me and goes late, as hour after hour I anoint people with that timeless sign of mortality, the ashed remains of last Spring's palms and speak the reminder that we are dust and to dust we shall return! That's enough, a hundred times over, to leave you ever so much

BRUEGEL, Pieter the Elder, The Fight between Carnival and Lent 1559,Oil on panel, 118 x 165 cm,Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

closer to the grave, especially if you, like me, were raised half-Quaker and half-Calvinist and screech every whole Ash Wednesday long at all this violative symbolism.

Anyway, a sore throat accompanied me through Ash Wednesday, worsened as the week went on, and then morphed into something else entirely after I decided to show up for my Sunday duties.

Even then, I couldn't quite take seriously that I might be sick: not until Louis,noting blood on my pillow, strongly suggested it was time to talk to my doc. So finally I did, and got what I needed to defeat the by-then systemic infection, beating back Satan and all its minions (does Satan have a gender, really???? or even exist, really???).

But as everyone knows who's tried to beat back Satan, it takes time! And though I've had lots of practice in lots of ways, this Satanic occupation has taken longer than usual to put to rout.

MASTER of the Legend of St. Ursula: St Michael Fighting Demons
1480-1500; Oil on oak panel with integrated frame, 30 x 19,5 cm
Museum Onze-Lieve-Vrouw ter Potterie, Bruges

So just yesterday did I finally have the energy to try to put a blog together and to get a product. And again today, I feel a little better, and am posting again!

Now then!

What has all that got to do with Joy?

Well, a couple of things.

First, I am not a joyful patient! I whine. I snuffle. I bark. I shut myself away. I become VERY hard to live with! And I lose track of most of the joy I try to cultivate as part of reverence.

And worst of all, I lose my appetite!

So a sure harbinger of better days is when I turn my hand back to cooking, which is one of my favorite things to do. (And these days, when we're eating out less for want of money, a very handy talent!) Today was that day for me. I've been hungering for a while for, but haven't until now had the energy to create, one of the comfort foods of my youth (yes, food was a major comfort on the days when I could eat-and there were many!)--cornbread.

Hmmm, you may say, BUT DON'T MOVE ON JUST YET! THE BEST IS COMING UP!

Now, as you may know, corn is a staple in the diets of poor people all over, and it was a very big deal in the south I grew up in. My grandmother--my mother's mother we all called Mama Ruth--was left widowed with six small children, 26 acres, and a mule and a cow, on the cusp of the depression. My mother grew up in a home where corn products were a daily part of the diet, a diet which was almost all homegrown, out of Mama Ruth's huge garden, or the chicken house, or the barn. So I grew up, like a lot of southern children of depression kids, with corn food everywhere!

Corn on the cob, roasted or boiled.

Corn in a pudding.

Corn in a stew.

Corn ground to meal

Some good corn meal from the Buffaloe Milling Co., Inc. in Kittrell, NC
(You'll have to reverse the label: I haven't figured out how to get my Mac to do that!)

and turned into...

Mush.

Cakes.

Breads.

Muffins.

Sticks.

And, because of its innate amazing qualities, cast iron vessels were the choice for lots of the cornmeal dishes. That's very important!

Me and one of my well-seasoned Wagner cast iron skillets--used just today for this bread!

So I've been hungering for cornbread, as it's evolved in my brain and in my cooking over the years.

Today I made some.

For blog purposes, I've tried to write down how I made it today and I've given it a name.

Jim's Breakfast Cornbread.

Here's how it goes. Feel free to experiment. Like most of what I cook, this is just the latest version of an evolving creation. It's easy. It's fun! And, do I say so myself, it's really good!

For this, you'll need a large and a smaller (but not too small) mixing bowl, a whisk and a spoon, some measuring cups and spoons, a cast iron skillet (9" or so), and a hot oven (about 400 degrees).

You'll need ingredients:

1/2 medium onion
3/4 small apple good for cooking
1 medium jalapeno pepper
1 clove garlic
1 1/4 cups of good all purpose flour
3/4 cup of good, fresh yellow (or white) cornmeal
about 2 tsp of baking powder
about 1/2 tsp kosher salt
1 cup skimmed milk
a dollop of buttermilk
about 1 oz. sharp cheddar cheese, grated not too fine
2 slices cooked bacon or turkey bacon, crumbled or cut up (optional if you're a vegetarian type)
2 tbsp butter
slightly less than 1/4 c of vegetable oil
2 egg whites or better, 1 large egg, beaten

So, here's how to do this:

Preheat the oven, inserting therein the skillet with the butter in it, so's it will melt as the oven and skillet heat up (watch it doesn't burn!)

While that's happening, chop the onion and apple (I leave the peel on the apple, but suit yourself),peel and chop the garlic, core, seed, and chop the pepper and add to onion-apple-garlic mix.

Combine the dry ingredients in the large bowl and whisk to mix.

Combine the milk, egg, buttermilk, oil in the smaller bowl and stir a little until mixed.

Add the chopped onion/apple/garlic/pepper to the liquid along with the cheese (and the bacon) and stir about.

Add all the liquid mix to the dry ingredients and stir about until everything is just moistened.

Take the skillet from the oven. Use a good thick hot pad--the handle will be very hot!
(I've had BAD experiences when I forgot that little fact!)

Swirl the melted butter around the skillet so the sides are buttered.

Dump the mix into the hot skillet (it will sizzle a little) and return the whole thing to the oven.

Bake it for about 25 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the middle comes out clean.

Remove from oven.

Cut into wedges.

Serve warm (also good cold later on--and can be reheated, but never ever microwaved!)
in wedges.

The finished product, after I gobbled some, on one of Sarah Hettlinger's great Bald Mountain Pottery plates.

This is good with more butter, with black strap molasses (my favorite--make sure it's unsulphured and made from sugar cane--full of iron too), probably with real maple syrup (for my New England friends!) though I've never had it that way, definitely with blackberry (or other varieties of) jam or preserves. It's a complete meal, but can also be supplemented if you're in a healthy mood with a side of stewed greens.

So there you are and there you have it! I had a great time cooking this (Joy!), and a great time eating it (More Joy!)! Now I'm going to try to take a couple of pictures for your entertainment, because I've learned from my friend Tinky that pictures are important!

Thanks to everyone who taught me about corn along the way: Mama Ruth, my own mom, Mary P, and her sisters Esther P and Ruth Eleanor, my sister, Ennes, who has her own version of this delectable, the ladies at the Church of the Holy Apostles and the Mediator in Philadelphia, who reminded me of the reverence due this kind of food and fed me a lot of joy when I needed it most!

Also, here's to all the purveyors of good southern food who turn up in my travels back home to the south. (One of these is Whitley's Barbecue in Murfreesboro, NC, where they make the best corn sticks ever and some very good east Carolina barbecue and great Brunswick stew. (That last's a link to a cool BBQ blog by a couple of self-styled BBQ Jews--and here's the progenitor of that blog. This will surely delight the Baltimore resident, BBQ loving bro of my good friend, Dr. Allan Goldberg!)

Look out for a BBQ post! I can smell it coming; and good BBQ is the very essence of reverence (except for the pigs).

Enjoy!

Peace out.

Jim