Big Mama’s Cornbread

In honor of my Big Mama for Mother’s Day –

A family recipe is a funny thing.  Some might think it is just an index card, yellowed and stained with use and reuse.  But really it’s so much more than that.  It’s a memory of love, togetherness, and tradition – conceived in the brain, but carefully stored in the heart.  

It’s a moment in time that can be recreated in your senses, however fleetingly, bringing back loved ones in a sweet fresh way.  That’s why our favorite recipes have names like Aunt Hallie’s Fruitcake or Aunt Lena’s Pecan Delight Pie.

Big Mama taught me to make cornbread when I was four.  She stood me on a box so I could be tall enough to stir the bowl.  My Big Mama wasn’t very big, maybe five foot tall, but she was large in my life.  A woman who raised five children by herself after my grandfather’s death, when the youngest child was only two years old.  Big Mama always smelled of toilet water and dusting powder, and lived in a large house in East Texas surrounded by four o’clock bushes and hydrangeas.  She had taken in boarders to support herself, feeding them from a smokehouse, chicken yard, and garden.

That big old house was full of curiosities, like a kitchen with no cabinets hanging on the wall, but rather blue and green safes with built-in sifters for flour and cornmeal.  And a huge white sink as long as a dining room table and a big white stove that rivaled a Studebaker for chrome and size.

So there we were, me four and she close to 80, both in rickrack bordered aprons, sifting flour, measuring milk and shortening, learning to crack eggs.  Big Mama gently teaching, telling me incredible family stories all the while.  Like how she taught my brother to make lemon meringue pie, about our Cherokee ancestors, about her dad and the Civil War and how she had to keep my premature aunt warm in a shoe box on the wood burning stove – all the while bragging on the way I stirred, pouring out life one cup at a time, serving up family for me.