Recipe of the Week: Skillet Cornbread

Thinking about my childhood grade school, got me thinking about home and family.  When she wasn’t my first grade teacher, my Aunt Jeannette was a lovable, warm, and very funny human being. All the Kyles (my mom’s side) were funny.  Not, let me tell you a joke funny, but witty and quick in a subtle conversational way that you could miss if you weren’t paying attention. In the early 1930’s, Aunt Jeannette attended Columbia University in New York City to prepare to be a teacher.  She had read the Bible at least twice cover to cover, word for word, before she died at 96. She loved nature, especially birds.

I called her once about a bird song that was haunting me. As soon as I started to whistle the tune (yes, I can whistle a tune;that’s from my dad’s side) she knew exactly what bird it was. She was a gem and I miss her. But before I go all Tom Brokaw on you and tell about the husband she lost to a fluke jeep accident in WWII or the one she raised four adopted children with, let’s get to the point at hand, Skillet Cornbread.

 

Seeing Aunt Jeannette here in my Aunt Ruth’s kitchen, made me think about Kyle women and cooking. One of their best recipes I am sharing only because I am feeling especially generous today and the nostalgia is clouding my brain. Normally, I keep these family secrets to myself so the whole world can’t start making cornbread as well as we do.

Aunt Jeannette, and all her sisters, basically followed the recipe my Grandma Kyle used. Before you even attempt this cake-like, sumptuous bread, you must have a 9 inch cast iron skillet.  You can get an inexpensive one at Target or most hardware stores. In West Virginia, they sell them at the grocery store. I use a fancier Le Creuset one with brown enamel coating that I received as a wedding gift and like it very much, but any cast iron will do.

Ingredients:

1 cup white corn meal

1/4 cup flour

1 heaping tsp. baking powder (that in Grandma Kyle terms is spilling off the edges)

1 rounded tsp. salt (in her terms, high but not spilling off the edges)

2 Tbsp. sugar

1/4 tsp. baking soda

1 1/4 c. buttermilk

1 large egg

2 Tbsp. Crisco (yes Crisco, not butter flavored but plain old used to be Paula Deen’s favorite Crisco)

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

Mix corn meal, flour, baking powder, sugar and salt  in a medium mixing bowl. In another smaller bowl, mix baking soda and buttermilk together and let sit for a minute or two. Beat egg with a fork until combined but not frothy and stir into buttermilk.  Pour wet mixture into dry and mix with fork until smooth and not lumpy.

Heat on top of the stove until hot but not smoking, 2 Tbsp. Crisco in a 9 inch iron skillet. Pour cornbread batter into skillet and remove immediately from heat.  Batter should sizzle around the edges. Using an oven mitt, (I have made the painful mistake of omitting this little detail) place skillet in hot oven and bake for 20 minutes or until bread pulls away from the edges of the skillet and top is golden brown.  (Again, use mitt to remove from oven.)

Allow to cool for five minutes.  Gently loosen edges of bread with a knife.  Cover the top of the skillet with a dinner plate and (if the cooking gods are with you) slowly, gingerly flip the skillet onto the plate and the cornbread will slide out upside down and in a perfect mounded circle of golden brown.  If you feel it’s stuck to the skillet anywhere, use the gentle prodding with the knife trick again.

Cut into pie shaped triangles and butter (real butter) while warm. Serve immediately as anything–appetizer, dinner bread, with soup or drench it in honey and serve as dessert.

Or eat it for breakfast as cereal with milk like my Uncle Bill used to do.