Thanksgiving recipes from Arkansas
My friend says:
I can give you the recipe for my grandmother’s cornbread — although I don’t know that the measurements will make sense!
1/2 cup yellow cornmeal
1/2 cup self-rising flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
Scant 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1 egg
3/4 cup buttermilk
Mix dry ingredients, then add egg and buttermilk. Stir until well mixed. Bake in hot oven (425 degrees F) until lightly browned.
This recipe was first writen down in 1979 - until then things were just put in a bowl until they looked right. The family taught me (Gillian) to make cornbread by sight and feel when I visited them in Arkansas.
Important Note 1: The recipe doesn’t say it, but bake them in a “cured” cast iron cornbread skillet.
Important Note 2: The skillet should be HOT when the mixture is added to it.
Important Note 3: Rather than plain cornbread, for Thanksgiving we would use cornbread to make “dressing” (called “stuffing” in the north). The dressing might be stuffed inside a turkey, but more than likely not.
P.s. I don’t know why the recipe calls for different types of leavening (self rising flour, baking powder and baking soda), but it does and it works. Go figure.
And then my friend added a bit more:
If you really want Thanksgiving recipes, then I thought you might want one for making the dressing out of the cornbread too. The source of this one is my own handwritten notes of a recipe given to me over the phone by my other grandmother in 1987 when I was cooking my first Thanksgiving dinner.
3 cups crumbled cornbread
2 tablespoons butter
1/2 cup chopped celery
1 small onion (she sometimes added it; sometimes not. Usually not when I was there for obvious reasons)
2 eggs, beaten
2 cups chicken broth
2 tablespoons dried sage
salt and pepper to taste
In a large skillet over medium heat, melt the butter and saute the celery and onion until soft. Combine celery, onions, 3 cups crumbled corn bread, eggs, chicken broth, sage and salt and pepper to taste; mix well. Bake in a greased 9″ by 13″ baking dish at 350 degrees F for 30 minutes.
I asked about collard greens, because they were so very exotic to me when I first ate them.
We would have been more likely to have black eyed peas than collard greens, but prepared the same way. Boiled until tender (chopped greens about 45 minutes, peas about an 1 1/2 hours) and seasoned in a way that would disgust
you — ham or salt pork added to the water and boiled along with them. Lots of times we’d have ham rather than turkey, which might account for that.
Although I don’t know the exact age of the recipes, both my grandmothers used very similar ones and there are others that seem quite different, so I suspect their recipes are common to Arkansas, but may not be the same ones common in other parts of the south.
The one grandmother I have met is an awesome cook, so I do recommend trying that cornbread at least!
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