How To Make Hot-Water Cornbread By Toya Wolfe, Illustrated By Landis Blair
‘Cause Grandma’s from Jackson, Mississippi, she can go to work on cornbread and buttermilk or cornbread and beans or, well, cornbread and anything all smashed up in a bowl. But you live in Chicago, and are only country by association, so you’ll need something green, like greens or cabbage or spinach to accompany your cornbread. Choose one.
Toss the leaves in a big pot. Fill half of the pot with water if you’ve chosen cabbage or greens, and not quite half for spinach. Hook that up and go sit down. Sit in the kitchen. In the living room, something on TV might snatch your attention, and you’ll let too much water boil out of the pot. You can flip through a magazine, but DO NOT GET ON THE PHONE.
When you smell the greens/cabbage/spinach or hear some sizzling, check the pot. If you chose spinach, it might be done already. Frankly, it might be burning. The greens or cabbage should be fine. Now that you smell the food, it’s time to make the cornbread. You’ll need grease, baking powder, salt, and water (hot enough to melt paint off the walls). What did I miss? What will make the cornbread cornbread? If your answer was not corn meal, stop reading, stop cooking —maybe you should go watch TV or get on the phone. Call a friend and tell them that you don’t know jack about cooking. Order a pizza or some other takeout. If you stayed on your toes and answered correctly, you may continue.
Let the water boil until the bubbles spit angrily. In that big bowl you use for popcorn, mix yellow cornmeal, baking powder (just a pinch or the bread will taste straight up nasty!), half a teaspoon of salt and even less sugar (you ain’t making cake).
Add a tablespoon of grease so that the bread will stick together. Don’t sweat the fact that you’re about to fry it in grease too. Also, grease is simply another word for cooking oil. Do not go running into the garage and grabbing something you’d use on the car. Do not go to the bathroom for the TCB hair grease. If these thoughts have crossed your mind, cooking is way too dangerous for you, and you should go the pizza route.
I forgot to ask, what spoon are you using? If it’s the big one your mama hangs on the wall for decoration, she’ll trip. Go get the one from the drawer, the old one with the melted handle, (cause your stupid brother left it on the stove) and use that one.
Mix the ingredients while you watch the bubbles spit at everything outside the pot. Imagining how badly it would hurt if the spit landed on your arm will help you to be extra careful when you pour the water over the dry mixture. Do that now. Pour a fourth of the water in and stir. This ain’t enough water, but you’ll add a little, then repeat three more times. By now you should have a stiff, sloppy mix.
Grab a skillet and pour in enough grease so that you don’t have to tilt the pot in a million directions to cover the bottom, but no more than a quarter of an inch —you ain’t deep-frying chicken. Turn the heat up as high as it’ll go. When you think that the grease is hot, test it. Run the faucet and stick an already clean hand under it. And while we’re checking, you did wash the spinach/cabbage/greens, right?
Shake just a drop of water off of your hand into the pot; you ain’t trying to start a war between you and the grease, you just want to aggravate it a little. I know it sounds dangerous, but trust, you got this. If water starts popping all over the place, utilize the James Brown slide, and get the hell out of the way.
Now you know two things: one: you still got the moves, and two: the grease is ready for the batter.
Grab that crazy-looking spoon again and get a good amount of batter on it. Let it slide down the spoon. If it falls like cake batter, you’re in trouble. If it doesn’t move at all, you were too stingy with the water. If it falls in a lazy drip that takes four seconds to leave the spoon, you’re in business. Scoop a spoonful, and let that lazy batter drop down into the skillet. It should form an oval. Do this until there is no more room. Cover the bowl after you’ve filled the skillet, because you never know what else may want a taste of your cornbread.
You’ve probably done a good job, so as a reward, you get to sit down again. Don’t read this time, you’ll burn the cornbread. The phone will ring; it’s only a test, so let it go to voicemail. Sit down and think about how good the cornbread will taste all smashed up with the spinach/cabbage/greens. This will help you to focus. Sweat it; get up every few seconds to look at it, poke it, attempt to flip it, even though you realize, after hopping up for the sixth time, that you need to chill. This paranoid behavior is good — at least for the cornbread. Once you can get a spatula under it without it trying to fall apart, flip it, and repeat the sweating process. When this batch is done, do it over and over until the bowl is empty. Rinsing away batter because you’re tired of cooking is a no-no. And don’t even try to justify it by saying “It’s not real food yet.” Remember lectures you got growing up about people starving overseas, or simply think about the people starving right downtown.
Clean the big spoon, and make some Kool-Aid with it, because I bet somebody drank it all, and left just a swallow. Don’t even get mad this time, just make some more. Go get your favorite plate, because it’s time to go to work. Take the top off of the pot and inhale the steam. If it smells good, be dramatic and make an audible sound. Dig in! Get a nice amount of spinach/cabbage/greens on your plate. Use discretion. If other people have to eat, don’t be all greedy. Pick the best piece of cornbread, pour some Kool-Aid into a glass, and make your way to the table.
If you’ve lived down South, you’ll probably smash the cornbread into the spinach/cabbage/greens, and you might eat it with your hands. If you went away to college, you might find yourself eating with a fork and knife, cutting the cornbread like it’s stuffed pizza, chewing it completely, and then eating the spinach/cabbage/greens separately, which defeats the whole purpose of why you made cornbread in the first place. If you must, compromise: smash it all up, then eat it with a fork. Wipe your mouth before sipping the Kool-Aid, or you’ll have grease glaciers floating in your cup. If you don’t care, don’t wipe.
When you’re done eating, you may want to put the food away: don’t. It’s too hot, and you could spoil it. Go watch TV and rub your belly. If you’ve followed directions, you should be full, happy, and sleepy. Don’t sleep yet. Studies have shown that sleeping right after you eat ain’t healthy, but since you just ate fried bread, smothered spinach/cabbage/greens, and drank a cup of sugared-water, you probably ain’t too concerned about those studies. If you want to have leftovers, though, you have to stay up so that you can put the food away in about an hour.
Call Grandma and tell her that you just hooked up some hot-water cornbread. If she lives in your city, you’ve just messed up; she’ll want you to bring her some so that she can taste it; not because she’s hungry, it’s actually because she’s always doubted your cooking skills. In her mind, you can’t be both educated and domesticated. If she’s moved back to Jackson, she’ll just ask you a bunch of questions about how you made it, just to see if you jacked it up. No matter where Grandma lives, or what she says about your cornbread, pat yourself on the back because you didn’t give up and order pizza and you didn’t set the kitchen on fire.
About the Author
Toya Wolfe was born and raised in the (now demolished) Robert Taylor Homes on Chicago’s South Side. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia College Chicago with a Dwight W. Follet Merit Award.
Her stories have appeared in African Voices, Chicago Journal, Chicago Reader, Hairtrigger 27, and Warpland: A Journal of Black Literature and Ideas. She is the recipient of the Zora Neale Hurston-Bessie Head Fiction Award, the Union League Civic & Arts Foundation Short Story Competition and the Betty Shifflet/John Schultz Short Story Award.
She currently resides in Chicago, where she is at work on a short story collection. Landmarks is her debut novel.
About the Illustrator
Landis Blair is the author and illustrator of The Envious Siblings: and Other Morbid Nursery Rhymes, as well as the illustrator of the New York Times bestseller From Here to Eternity and the graphic novel The Hunting Accident, which won Best in Adult Books at the Excellence in Graphic Literature awards. He has published illustrations in numerous print and online periodicals including The New Yorker, The New York Times, Chicago magazine, VQR, and Medium. He lives in Chicago. To peruse his work, please visit his website at https://www.landisblair.com/