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Fatty Bread and Buttermilk
This entree never appeared on any bill-of-fare. It is hoped that nobody will make it, it might be thought too rich for good health. It is put in here merely in an historical sort of way, because it is strictly American and is not on record in any of the French books. To be still more precise, it is an institution of Blackville, and the people who believed in it had broad shiny faces and did not know a thing about dyspepsia. Although again it is hoped nobody will ever make anything so greasy anymore, it has to be recorded that the boys who did not belong in Blackville had a wonderful knack of coming home from squirrel shooting at sundown, just at the most favorable time for snatching a portion of this peculiar feast, to which the Blackville people did not welcome them, and always declared it tasted better than butternuts. There are many Blackvilles in the United States, and the one where this dish came nearest being named in French was on Bayou Black, not very far from New Orleans, but you could not translate the French spoken there, and, moreover, calabashes full of sugar cane juice from the mills took the place of buttermilk, and it was not quite the same thing. But there was a Blackville near that large hotel at White Sulphur Springs, and Blackville near Brownsville, on Blackwater river, at the Sweet Springs in Missouri. It was only in the flush times of hog killing that Blackville could indulge in this luxury; but if company was expected from the opposition village, whatever its name was, perhaps the young Blackvillans with their 'possum dogs would pass a whole night in the woods and fell any number of trees till they had 'possums enough. Because you can't make fatty bread without fat, and 'possum's fat does very well.
Somebody has to churn in the morning and take the buttermilk down to the spring house to become cool. The rest of it is very simple: 1 pound of corn meal. 1/2 pound of lard or 'possum fat. Salt. Pour the lard, melted, into the meal, and stir in enough cold water to make it like thin mush.
Spread in thin cakes on the hot stove lid, and when fried on one side turn them over. If you have no stove, but only a fireplace that takes in half a hickory tree trunk at a time, rake out some coals and bake the cakes in a spider.
To be eaten hot, with cold buttermilk.
In extreme contrast to the foregoing is the Whiteville variety of bread.
Under the storytelling there is a straightforward corn cake: meal, fat, salt, water, cooked on a griddle. The proportions are the striking part, and the reason the author half-apologizes for printing it at all.
- The ratio is the whole pointOne pound of cornmeal to half a pound of fat is roughly 3 cups meal to 1 cup melted lard. That is several times the fat in any modern cornbread or hoecake, and it is deliberate — the cakes fry in their own shortening. Cutting it back to a few tablespoons gives you a decent hoecake, but not this dish.
- 'Possum fatNot obtainable and not worth pursuing. Rendered leaf lard is the closest thing in the recipe itself; bacon drippings will read as smokier and saltier than intended.
- A spiderA cast-iron skillet on three short legs, meant to stand over raked coals. A plain cast-iron skillet on a burner does the same work.
- The hot stove lidThe cooking surface of a wood range, used as a bare griddle. Modern equivalent is a heavy griddle or skillet at medium to medium-high, about 375F — hot enough to set the cake at once without scorching the cornmeal before the center cooks.
- Batter consistency"Like thin mush" means pourable but not runny; it should spread on its own into a thin round and stop. Cornmeal keeps absorbing water, so mix and cook without a long rest or the batter stiffens.
- SaltUnmeasured, as usual in this book. About 1 1/2 teaspoons for a pound of meal is in keeping; if you use bacon fat, start lower.
- ButtermilkThe original is true churn buttermilk — the thin, faintly sweet liquid left after butter comes, taken to the spring house to chill. Cultured buttermilk from a carton is thicker and sharper. Either works as the cold counterweight to the fat, which is its whole function here.
- YieldA pound of meal makes a large batch of thin cakes, three or four inches across; the exact count depends on how thin you spread them. Serve them straight off the pan; they turn heavy and greasy as they cool, which is why the recipe insists on hot.
Jessup Whitehead wrote for working American hotel and restaurant cooks in the late nineteenth century, and he padded his books with digressions like this one — dishes that never went on a bill of fare but that he thought worth recording before they vanished. "Blackville" is used here not as one identifiable town but as a generic period label for the Black quarter of a Southern town — the text itself says there are many Blackvilles, though real places of that name also exist — and the name circulated widely through illustrated-magazine caricature of the 1870s and 80s; Whitehead uses it in the condescending register of his day, which is plain on the page. What sits underneath the voice is accurate rural economy: fat was seasonal and came in a rush at hog-killing time, buttermilk was the byproduct of a morning's churning and had to be cooled in a spring house, and opossum was hunted at night with dogs for the fat as much as the meat. The cake itself belongs to the wide family of Southern hoecakes and corn pones — meal, water, salt, hot iron — distinguished only by how much shortening the household could afford to put in it. His closing nod to "the Whiteville variety" reads as a joke, presumably a leaner counterpart, though the page here does not show it.