Cooking up a Memory

I've been thinking about my mom a bit lately, missing her, missing being able to shoot the shit about food or whatever was on our minds. Back to this train of thought in a minute.

Split Pea Soup and Hot Water Corn Cakes

It was one of those gray, damp, rainy, blah Willamette Valley days. Only problem, we're on the dry side of the Cascades and not on the wet side. We're not supposed to have those days, but during the worst drought in our historical records, we'll take it.

But still, such weather motivates neither Ann nor I to do anything other than sit huddled under blankets on the sofa in front of the fire. I'm sure I had something lovely and spring-appropriate planned for dinner, it being May, but that all went out the window when Ann, keying off the dreary weather, asked, "Can you make some soup for dinner?"

Well, of course, I can make soup for dinner, soup from almost nothing. That got me thinking about Mom again and her ability to make delicious soup from a potato and two strips of bacon. That apple didn't roll too far from the tree.

And that got me to thinking back to when I was a little boy, not as tall as the stove was high, probably 55 years ago. To accompany her potato soup, she would make little corn cakes by pouring boiling water over cornmeal and then frying the batter.

I thought, "What the hell; why not give it a try?" At worst, I've wasted a few cents of cornmeal. At best, I've surprised Ann and I have cooked up one distant, but cherished memory.

And so I poured some boiling water over cornmeal with a bit of salt, enough water to make a batter of pancake consistency. And I fried them up with excellent results, some damn fine poor folks' food.

Definitely, my corn cakes are different from what my mother used to make. There's no way to call her and ask, but I can call one of her sisters and I should do that, before all memory of this piece of family history is gone. Mom's were made with white cornmeal to start with, as were her cornpones (made with buttermilk) and cracklin' cornbread, two of the other corn dishes that were a constant on our table. And mom's batter spread very thinly and quickly, whereas mine took the slightest coaxing with a spoon.

In any case, I have managed to resurrect a memory of a once-quite popular Southern food that is part of my culinary heritage. After all, my family is southern through and through, coming from the tobacco lands of  the Virginia-North Carolina border on my mother's side and both North and South Carolina on my father's side.

We now think of hot water cornbread as a poor southern food, a food almost lost to time now, at least here in the US. But we southerners are the latecomers to the game. Hot water corn products are as old as our ability to boil water and grind corn, many thousands of years at least. The American colonists learned of it from the native tribes who learned it from tribes in Mexico where our corn originated.

And though we have nearly lost this food tradition in the US, it lives strong in northern South America in the form of arepas, which hold strong in Venezuela, Colombia, and even Bolivia. And it lives on in countless other corn dishes all over Mexico, Central America, and South America.

I might even have been on the verge of losing this tradition as foggy as it is in my mind. I am happy that the recent rainy weather spurred me to take the chance to cook up a memory.