Which Makes Best Dressing White or Yellow Meal
How I Mastered the Art (and Politics) of Cornbread Dressing
ATLANTA — I just wanted to learn how to make good cornbread dressing. Instead, I stepped on the third rail of Southern home cooking.
It started last year, when I tamped down my natural proclivity toward Midwestern bread stuffing in deference to a dish practically every cook here in the South bakes outside the turkey for Thanksgiving. How hard to make could a pan of cornbread dressing be?
Very hard, it turns out. My first attempt was lousy. So this year, I got serious. I read every recipe I could find and pinned down the best Southern cooks I know. I asked for help on Facebook, and got more than 100 responses.
It wasn't long before I realized I had plummeted down a rabbit hole. Cornbread dressing is a litmus test on class, race, regional loyalties and grandmothers.
This came as no surprise to Ronni Lundy, who probably knows more about the food of the Appalachian South than anyone. She was born in rural Kentucky but grew up in Louisville as a member of what she calls the Hillbilly Diaspora of the 1950s and '60s. Her new book, "Victuals," is a definitive lesson on cooking and eating in that region.
"Just give it up," she told me. "There isn't a cornbread dressing. You're going to need to acknowledge that."
Still, I persevered. The first decision I faced was the cornmeal itself: white or yellow? As with most of my dressing questions, the answer depends on where you grew up.
More than a few people told me that white cornmeal is for people and yellow cornmeal is for animal feed. Others were deeply loyal to yellow cornmeal. The regional differences seemed to be based on the kind of corn that grew around you. If the white corn was sweeter, that's what was ground for cornbread. Same with yellow corn.
Ms. Lundy likes white cornmeal because that's what her people ate. Edna Lewis, the authority on Southern country cooking from Virginia, also preferred finely ground white cornmeal.
Kevin Gillespie, who grew up in North Georgia, likes white cornmeal and uses it at his restaurant Revival in Decatur. (To go deeper on cornbread, catch his side of a biscuit-versus-cornbread debate at last month's Southern Foodways Alliance Symposium in Oxford, Miss.) But Sean Brock, the cornbread whisperer at Husk in Charleston, S.C., and Nashville, likes whatever cornmeal smells better. ("Nose over eyes," he said.)
After running through a couple of recipes with both, I landed on yellow because it gave my dressing a little more muscle and color. Whatever the color, buy the best, freshest cornmeal you can find. A couple of standard grocery-store brands I tried had an oddly pronounced corn flavor that tasted almost artificial.
Next came what turned out to be the most divisive issue: whether to use sugar.
Jenifer Ward, who lives in Shreveport, La., but grew up in Arkansas, posted an old video on my Facebook page in which her parents stand in their kitchen and repeat a popular refrain about cornbread containing sugar: That's not cornbread, that's cake.
"Cornbread with sugar," her dad says, "is the kind you get up in Yankeeland."
Braver food writers than I have taken on this cultural divide, positing that cornbread with sugar was something white cooks made because sugar was too expensive for many black families. It's a reductive analysis that will lead you quickly into the rigorous debate over who gets to decide what Southern food really is.
At this point, I had to turn to Michael Twitty, a scholar of Southern cooking's African roots. His dedication runs so deep that he dresses up in period clothes and cooks food of the African diaspora at restored plantations.
He traces cornbread dressing back to kush, a kind of cornbread scramble created by enslaved Africans who had to make do with antebellum rations.
Sweet cornbread, he contends, was indeed part of their food tradition. "A lot of the plantation recipes I've uncovered for cornbread often include molasses," he said, because molasses offered energy and iron to help people get through the day.
"This is political stuff," he warned.
Ms. Lundy, the Appalachian food expert, has been writing about sugar and cornbread since the 1980s. She was reluctant to wade into the mess I had created for myself.
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"I have black friends who do not put sugar in cornbread and are adamant about it, and white friends in Appalachia who do," she said, encouraging me to consider instead the effect of generations raised on sweet cornbread from a box.
"I am walking way out on a limb here, but I suspect the Jiffy factor is far more important than the racial divide now," she said, referring to the popular cornbread mix.
As a white woman with Wisconsin roots raised in Detroit by a mother who rarely made cornbread, I had no stake in the game. I just like my cornbread savory.
The next issue is butter or bacon fat. I sometimes bake cornbread in bacon fat, but butter plays better with the other flavors on a Thanksgiving plate.
Once I had my cornbread, I had to make a call on texture. Some members of my ad hoc cornbread council pushed me toward a drier, chunkier dressing with a craggy, crisp top. Others insisted I make a batter that bakes into something akin to a soufflé-like casserole.
After a couple of batches, I fell hard for the soft, spoonable Southern soufflé style, which doesn't require cubing and toasting the cornbread. I simply tore it into big chunks and let it dry overnight.
Which brings us to the schism over bread. An all-cornbread dressing has its constituency, but I side with those who say dressing requires a little bread to lighten it up.
Some fancy cooks use brioche. Others take it downtown with a sleeve of saltines or old hot dog buns. Nathalie Dupree, the Southern cook, suggests biscuits. I chose soft sandwich bread with crusts cut off.
If you've made it this far, take heart. You are almost out of the woods. Everyone agreed that lots of salt and pepper and a good amount of onions and celery sautéed in plenty of butter were essential. There's a strong lobby for poultry seasoning, that savior of the harried Thanksgiving cook, but I went instead with freshly chopped sage and thyme. It's what the Southern cookbook author Virginia Willis does, so it's good enough for me.
I put all of this in a big bowl, heeding the advice of cooks who suggested adding a couple of beaten eggs. Then I turned my attention to the essence of Thanksgiving dressing: lots of good, homemade turkey stock.
The cornbread council was very specific on this point. Add stock until you think you have enough, and then add a cup or two more. The key word is soupy. Massage the mess with your hands. Add more stock, work it in and stop only when the whole thing feels like extra-thick pancake batter with a few chunks. If you have some turkey drippings, stir them in now.
This was a perfect base recipe, ready to pour into a buttered baking pan. Those of you who can't leave well enough alone may brown a little less than a pound or so of spicy Italian sausage or fresh andouille. Or you could mix in toasted pecans, or even a cup or two of corn kernels. An editor friend insists on a pint of chopped oysters.
Either way, congratulations. You've navigated a deceptively simple standard of the Southern repertoire. Just know that there is always someone out there who will tell you it's wrong.
Recipes: Southern Cornbread Dressing | More Thanksgiving Dishes
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/09/dining/cornbread-dressing-thanksgiving.html
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