Creamed corn and tomato sandwiches
I saw an article about growing up Southern and grandmother’s creamed corn. Well I grew up southern – in Georgia – but neither one of my grandmothers made creamed corn. Dad’s mother lived in the south Georgia town of Americus while Mom’s lived on a farm near Gray. Both took a knife, scraped the corn off the cob and fried the kernels in bacon fat. I think the only creamed corn we ever ate came out of a can and I thought it was a terrible waste of good corn. Maybe they only put the bad corn in the creamed stuff to mask the taste. Good corn should be fried, preferably in a cast iron black skillet.
The article also mentioned tomato sandwiches. That is something completely alien to me. Tomato sandwiches are a summer southern staple? News to me. I can’t imagine a sandwich of nothing but white bread (which we used to call light bread), tomatoes and mayonnaise. Was this poor folk’s food? Didn’t the bread get soggy? Were they too poor to have meat?
My mother was an awful cook so I did not have a favorite meal growing up. My mother’s best dish was potato salad. But Dad liked her cooking. They often joked about the first meal my mother made when they got married. It was chitterlings. Dad loved chitterlings but said that Mom’s slid around the plate and were so tough that he could not cut them with a knife. He said mom was crying and he was trying to console her. He then picked up a morsel and swallowed it whole. Turns out that Mom did not know to boil them for the requisite number of hours – or pressure cook them. Afterwards, when she had leaned to cook them she boiled them, rolled them in flour and fried them. Dad loved them but my brother and I refused to eat them.
My Dad’s mother’s cooking was also less than memorable. However, my mother’s mother used to cook fried rabbit (that my grandfather had shot), gravy, biscuits and grits to die for. I also liked her “dog bread” which was corn meal mixed with buttermilk, fried in bacon fat. It was called dog bread because it was served to the dogs mixed with table scraps and pot likker (that’s the southern spelling of liquor). She would give me a piece of the bread and let me sop it in the pot likker – leaving out the table scraps. Those were lucky dogs. But my mother was appalled. Occasionally I now make myself dog bread using turkey bacon. I even use a black cast iron skillet. Its good but not as good as I remember my grandmother’s who insisted on being called “Mary” much to the chagrin of my parents.
My brother was clearly my family’s favorite. I didn’t mind. He was my best friend. But when we visited the farm Mary would put her arms around me and say “this is my boy.” I loved her. We were outside one day and she was helping me ride my bike when she suffered a massive stroke and died. It was April 12, 1951. In those days, the funeral home sent her back to the farm to lie in state in the parlor. I insisted on sleeping in the parlor with her so they put a cot in the room. I was five years old. I never left her side until they took her to the church and buried her in the family cemetery. I always pay her a visit when I go back to Gray. I sure miss her and her fried rabbit and dog bread.
haroldblackphd.com 