Grain and Fire Quotes

“Debates about yellow and white cornmeal and sugar versus no sugar continued just as strong as ever. Crescent Dragonwagon, whose wide-ranging Cornbread Gospels contains more than 200 recipes, observed that the best cornbread is that made by your mother or grandmother. Perhaps the most famous line in the debate came from Kentucky's Ronni Lundy:"‘If God had meant for cornbread to have sugar in it, he’d have called it cake.”
― Rebecca Sharpless, Grain and Fire: A History of Baking in the American South

“By 1950, cornbread mixes abounded, many the products of local or regional companies. The Chicago-based giant Jiffy, with its sweet flavor, began to make inroads into southern pantries.”
― Rebecca Sharpless, Grain and Fire: A History of Baking in the American South

“As African Americans moved from the South to the cities of the North, they took cornbread with them. Helen Mendes, who grew up in New York eating the foods of her mother's South Carolina home, included six cornbread recipes in her exploration of West African and American cooking. Three of the recipes had no sugar, and two had only small amounts. Clarence McKinnon of Jamaica, Long Island, however, included one-third of a cup in his. Mendes observed, "It tastes like cake and stays moist for days.”
― Rebecca Sharpless, Grain and Fire: A History of Baking in the American South

“As southerners moved to town, cornbread continued to be a way of life for many – by choice for some and by necessity for others, because cornmeal remained cheaper than flour. The younger generation of affluent housewives needed a little coaxing, however. Southern Living magazine, which spun off from Progressive Farmer in 1966, had an article sentimentally (and incorrectly) titled ‘Cornbread: The South's Own Creation.’ Its recipe for ‘Southern Cornbread’ contained no flour and no sugar, and it did not specify white or yellow cornmeal. Four years later, an anonymous Southern Living writer straddled all the divides, commenting, ‘There are great controversies about white versus yellow cornmeal, whether sugar should be added, and whether the bread should be made with sweet milk or buttermilk. And there are strong arguments for every side.’ Perhaps half of the southern cornbread recipes after World War II called for sugar, which critics vehemently described as a ‘Yankee’ practice”
― Rebecca Sharpless, Grain and Fire: A History of Baking in the American South

“For Black and white southerners alike, tea cakes remained the most popular cookie. People recall them as ‘plain’ and not overly sweet.”
― Rebecca Sharpless, Grain and Fire: A History of Baking in the American South

“Genevieve Sadler recalled young men from the Ozark Mountains politely refusing her unfamiliar pumpkin pie but eagerly eating fried pies made from dried peaches.”
― Rebecca Sharpless, Grain and Fire: A History of Baking in the American South

“Mean kids made fun of their peers from the countryside. Anna May Peyrot Wharton, who went to all-white schools, recalled "smart-aleck girls": "They'd snigger and say, 'Look! Look! She's eating one of them old biscuits and we got light bread.”
― Rebecca Sharpless, Grain and Fire: A History of Baking in the American South

“Numerous people recalled their shame as children at bringing homemade biscuits in their school lunches.”
― Rebecca Sharpless, Grain and Fire: A History of Baking in the American South

“Cathead biscuits" were shaped by hand rather than by rolling and cutting. They earned their name by being extra large — as big as a cat's head.”
― Rebecca Sharpless, Grain and Fire: A History of Baking in the American South

“The quality of a woman's biscuits still stood in for her work as a housekeeper. More than ever, biscuits also represented social class. Margaret McDow MacDougall remembered, "We had tiny little biscuits like this, and the mill children had great hunky biscuits. It was food for them; for us it was dainty little this, that, and the other..”
― Rebecca Sharpless, Grain and Fire: A History of Baking in the American South

“The period between 1900 and 1940, with cheap flour and reliable baking powder, might well be called the golden age of southern biscuits. Georgian John Patterson Vaughn exulted in the newfound prosperity that meant he could have biscuits instead of cornbread for breakfast, exclaiming, "Now I got yaller butter and biscuits ever’ morning.”
― Rebecca Sharpless, Grain and Fire: A History of Baking in the American South

“Food reformers believed that wheat bread was more socially refined than cornbread. In eastern Kentucky, the founders of the Hindman Settlement School sought to replace mountain people's cornbread with more ‘civilized’ wheat biscuits and bread.”
― Rebecca Sharpless, Grain and Fire: A History of Baking in the American South

“The term ‘hushpuppies’ came into common use in the 1920s, to mean cornbread fried alongside fish, in the same grease.”
― Rebecca Sharpless, Grain and Fire: A History of Baking in the American South

“The boiling water began cooking the meal, rendering it softer and less gritty. The pones fried quickly, making the outside brown and crunchy while the insides remained tender. White Texan Hester Calvert fed her family of ten on cornbread patties, sometimes called ‘dog bread,’ during the lean times of late winter.”
― Rebecca Sharpless, Grain and Fire: A History of Baking in the American South

“Hot-water cornbread was a favorite of African Americans. Clara Butler recalled that her grandmother Betty Sadler Manning made it from homegrown cornmeal, salt, sugar, and melted bacon drippings, plus of course boiling water, and she fried it in bacon fat as well.”
― Rebecca Sharpless, Grain and Fire: A History of Baking in the American South

“The white and yellow cornmeal controversy continued. William Riley of Sylva, North Carolina, emphasized, ‘White corn is for folks, yellow for critters.’ Farm families prized their white corn. Texan Pearl Wynn Guderian recalled, ‘Oh, my mother did not want the yellow meal. We always had to plant some white corn so we would have our cornmeal for year-round use.’ The accomplished cooks in famed chef Edna Lewis's African American family in Virginia specified it in many recipes. Southerners loved having a choice about something as elemental as corn.”
― Rebecca Sharpless, Grain and Fire: A History of Baking in the American South

“People in the nineteenth century often called the outside coating for cakes by the older name, icing, rather than by the newer term, frosting.”
― Rebecca Sharpless, Grain and Fire: A History of Baking in the American South

“Many people continued to refer to cookies as cakes, but the newer term derived from the Dutch word koekje, became increasingly common in the United States after the Civil War.”
― Rebecca Sharpless, Grain and Fire: A History of Baking in the American South

“Southerners mostly regarded pumpkin pies as exotic imports from the North.”
― Rebecca Sharpless, Grain and Fire: A History of Baking in the American South

“The quality of a woman's biscuits it became a stand-in for her character. Cookbook writer Mary Stuart Harrison Smith sneered in 1885, "Nothing can be more inelegant than a large, thick biscuit.”
― Rebecca Sharpless, Grain and Fire: A History of Baking in the American South

“Biscuits represented prosperity. B.W. Orrick, son of a poor white farmer, remembered that when his family lived in Arkansas, it was cornbread three times a day. Once they moved to Texas, however, 'we could eat biscuits for breakfast.' A break from cornbread was a step up the culinary and social ladder.”
― Rebecca Sharpless, Grain and Fire: A History of Baking in the American South

“White cookbook author Mary Stewart Harrison Smith insisted that the right cornmeal (which was also white) completely did away with the need for sugar: ‘Good meal is essential to its perfection. It should be made of white corn, and ground in a mill worked by water-power. Any addition of sugar is thought to spoil it, the native sweetness of the corn being all sufficient.’ The Macon merchant W.A. Huff could have read Smith's mind, advertising in 1866 ‘Prime White Meal Water Ground.’ Yellow, industrial or ground meal had no place on fine tables, according to the connoisseurs.”
― Rebecca Sharpless, Grain and Fire: A History of Baking in the American South

“Southern farmers favored soft red winter wheat, which had less gluten and less water than northern varieties. It was easier to grind than hard wheat, and the flower had a dazzlingly white appearance.”
― Rebecca Sharpless, Grain and Fire: A History of Baking in the American South

“The long-standing debate over yellow and white cornmeal may have its roots in the bitter, scorched flavor of kiln-dried yellow corn. White cornmeal was supposed to be sweeter and tastier than yellow, and of course whiteness had symbolic overtones of purity and race. Wealthy white North Carolinian Catherine Edmondston declared adamantly, "White is the only corn fit for bread.”
― Rebecca Sharpless, Grain and Fire: A History of Baking in the American South

“Yet class distinctions remained. It was most proper for upper-class Europeans to eat wheat bread. And so Europeans worked mightily to grow wheat.”
― Rebecca Sharpless, Grain and Fire: A History of Baking in the American South

“People's tastes evolve, of course, and to the dismay of some English colonists, their countrymen began to develop a liking for corn. Robert Beverley reported in the 1720s that some ‘gentlemen’ in Virginia preferred ‘pone’ made of ‘Indian meal’ over wheat bread.”
― Rebecca Sharpless, Grain and Fire: A History of Baking in the American South

“How well did Europeans adapt to cornbread? Snobby travelers despised it, describing it as ‘harsh,’ ‘coarse,’ and ‘unpleasant,’ an acquired taste at best. But poor people ate it readily, even on special occasions.”
― Rebecca Sharpless, Grain and Fire: A History of Baking in the American South

“Wealthy white southerners, obligated with provisioning their indentured servants and enslaved people, considered corn to be the most appropriate, and often only, source of food for their charges. Enslaved people often had cornbread three times a day, sometimes with fat pork or salt herring on the side. Not only was corn cheaper and easier to grow than wheat, but Europeans thought that it provided more energy for working people.”
― Rebecca Sharpless, Grain and Fire: A History of Baking in the American South

“A johnnycake was made of thick dough set on a flat piece of wood, which could lend a distinctive taste to the bread, then propped in front of the fire rather than in or over the ashes.”
― Rebecca Sharpless, Grain and Fire: A History of Baking in the American South

“Baked, ground corn sustained American colonists. For years, Samuel Kercheval said, ‘johnnycake and pone’ were the only breads in his backcountry home. The simplest cornbread consisted of cornmeal and water kneaded together to form a small cake that was generally baked as a cast bread, on a flat surface, and variously called pone, hoecake, or johnnycake. The only difference among them was the cooking surface. Pones were baked directly on the hearth. Hoecakes cooked on a flat piece of metal – usually a plate, not the garden implement, despite the name.”
― Rebecca Sharpless, Grain and Fire: A History of Baking in the American South