This post was a delightful Facebook find. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did!
My friend’s mother, Miss Sylvia, is making cornbread. Her house is alive with the smell. The eighty-two-year old woman cooks cornbread the old-fashioned way. An iron skillet in the oven. Lots of butter.
Sylvia tests the hot bread by poking it with a broom bristle. If the bristle is gummy, she licks the bristle then returns the skillet to the oven. If not, it’s Cornbread-Thirty.
I watch this bristle maneuver. She breaks a piece of straw from her broom. And I don’t want to ask, but I have to.
“Is that broom clean?” I say.
“Relax,” Sylvia says. “It’s just one bristle.”
“But is it clean?”
“Define clean.”
“Has it been used to sweep your floor?”
“This particular broom? Yes.”
“Your dusty, residential, hepatitis-C floor?”
“Yes.”
So this cornbread is contaminated and will probably kill me. But then, I’m a dinner guest, I HAVE to eat it even though the old woman’s floors are frequently used by a family dog who is nicknamed “Egypt” because wherever he goes he makes little pyramids.
Still, I love cornbread. I was raised on the stuff, just like everyone else in America.
My mother used to make cornbread a few times per week. Sometimes more. Primarily because it was cheap, and my family ate cheap food.
You always knew when it was cornbread night because my mother would make a fresh pot of boiling bacon grease with a few navy beans floating in it. She called it bean and ham soup, but I call it cardiac arrest stew.
MaryMarvella 