Cornbread Baking by Kat Magendie

You would think growing up with a mother born on a farm in Arkansas, a biological mother born a hillbilly, a daddy from Tennessee, and from living in Southern States most of my life where the school lunch program more times than not had cornbread (the really sweet kind) on our ugly plastic trays—hey, this was in the day when children didn’t get to pick what they ate, either in school or at home, you ate what was on your plate or you went hungry—that I could prepare a good pan of cornbread.

You think wrong. My cornbread was bad. Not just bad, but inedible. There was the cornbread where I read, “put grease in pan, put pan in oven to heat grease, put cornbread in hot pan.” What I didn’t understand was, the extra grease was to be poured into the batter and stirred in, then that batter was to be poured over the hot greased pan to bake. I poured the batter over all of that liquid, and the result was a cornbread swimming in oil. Ugh. My brothers laughed their arses off over that. The next time I attempted to bake cornbread, I was more careful. I thought. But, when that cornbread came out of the oven, I took my knife to cut into it, and…and…the knife didn’t slice through. What? Huhn? I turned the cornbread out onto the counter—and by now I had an audience of four brothers guffawing—Tommy, or David, or Johnny, or Mike, picked up the “cornbread” and rapped it against the counter. It didn’t break. It didn’t bend. This set my brothers to heights of hilarity only seen on shows like Gilligan’s Island or The Carol Burnett Show. I burst out crying, since that is what girls my age did. My brothers, bless their stinky hearts, felt sorry for me and assured me the cornbread was fine, even as they took it outside and tried to kill snakes with it in the canal out back.

But, what about gratitude, you may be asking? Well, many years later, I stubbornly measured and stirred cornmeal, flour, oil, buttermilk, egg, baking powder, salt, and a bit of sugar, then poured the mix into a hot-greased iron skillet and then into the oven it went. Ding. Deep Breath. I cut it. I tasted. Perfect. Somehow, someway I made the perfect pan of cornbread. The ghost of a Southern Relative took me by the hand and said, “Okay, honey, this here’s how you do it…It ain't hard, child...” Gratitude for good cornbread baking. Why not?