Author
Julie Herman is the author of the multi-award nominated Three Dirty Women
Landscaping, Inc. Mysteries for adults. A lapsed Master Gardener, she lives on
a small organic farm outside Houston where she and her husband ride herd on an
ever-shifting population of creatures. Today she talks about her middle-grade
mystery and shares an old family recipe for spoonbread. Learn more about Julie
and her books at her website.
Ever since we got the
chickens, I do a lot of cooking with eggs. This recipe for spoonbread came from
my father’s mother’s mother, via my Aunt Ruth, who wasn’t a cook, but loved
this recipe because there were so few ingredients.
Sophie from Burned loves just about everything her
mother cooks, particularly her chicken and dumplings that they eat every
Tuesday night. Unfortunately, I have had little luck cooking decent dumplings.
So that particular culinary love of Sophie’s is an unfulfilled fantasy of mine.
Another of her favorite meals includes spoonbread, which I do actually cook —
and love.
As a historical note, I
looked at a lot of other spoonbread recipes, and this is the only one I have
seen that uses clabbered milk. The word clabber comes from the Irish
word for thickened. The Irish word for milk is banne. Stick them
together and you’ve got ‘bonnyclabber’ which is an old-fashioned word for
buttermilk.
Wray/Sinclair Family Spoonbread
Ingredients:
1 cup white cornmeal
2 cup boiling water
Butter (I use 2 -3 big
spoonfuls)
1 cup milk
1/2-teaspoon baking soda
1 Tablespoon lemon juice
2 eggs
Preheat oven to 350
degrees.
Sour the milk by adding 1/2
tsp baking soda dissolved in 1 tsp water and lemon juice. Set aside to clabber.
Do not let
the cat drink the milk. (This last was added by Aunt
Ruth. I don’t know what happens if the cat does in fact, drink the milk. I
suspect you would probably want to start a new batch.)
Grease 2 qt. baking dish
or muffin pans.
Scald cornmeal with the
boiling water. Stir in "some" butter. (See above for how much I
decided “some” butter was.)
Beat eggs. Add to cornmeal
mixture. Add milk. (Presumably the cat didn’t drink it!)
Pour batter into prepared
pan. Bake 45 - 60 minutes.
Makes a lovely custardy
corn side dish. My grandmother made this a lot during the Depression when food
was hard to afford. Sophie’s mom makes it because she’s a single mother on a
strict budget. I make it because it’s one of my favorite comfort foods. Enjoy!
Burned
Sophie would be the happiest girl in the
world if she could spend every day hanging out with her friends Yasmine and
Tanner, and riding her beloved horse, Cricket. But she stands to lose all of
that and more when her mother is accused of theft and arson. As evidence piles
up and friends turn away, Sophie scrambles to clear her mother’s name—and soon
finds herself in the middle of a hot mess.
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