Photo: My grandmother and mother’s cornbread mold with an ear of Bradford heirloom corn.
By Tom Poland, A Southern Writer
TomPoland.net
Born of fire, master of fire, and survivor of fire, my vintage cast iron cornbread mold fed many a soul. Best I figure it came to be in the 1930s. Those manufactured in the 1890s bore no marks. My mold bears no marks. Did I figure wrong? 1890s? That’s a lot of cornbread.
My mother retrieved it from ashes when her home place burnt to the ground in ’64. No house fire could crack this veteran of smoldering coals and hissing hickory. It drew strength from Earth’s basics. A swift river ground corn between rocks we call millstones. The old days and old ways reigned supreme.
Our old friends, firewood and wood stoves, have long brought us comfort. They tell tales too that make for good reading. I am old enough to remember how my Grandmother Walker cooked on a wood stove. I am old enough to remember how my father’s father girdled oaks in summer and felled the dried-out trees to burn yellow logs with red hearts in a black stove come winter. The fragrant wood smelled sweet and sour at the same time. Granddad would spit at the stove with its cherry-red stovepipe, each glob of phlegm landing with a hiss. When one landed atop the stove it rolled around sibilating like a ball bearing from Hell. Such a tale doesn’t drive a taste for cornbread but it seemed to comfort him. Let’s move on.
Several years ago I interviewed wild game chef, Frank Beckham, over Pawleys Island way. Frank loves cast iron skillets and wood stoves. Said Frank, “I lived out on the river in this dome house some friends of mine started building. I was working as a carpenter and had an outdoor kitchen with a dirt floor and wood stove. Every Wednesday night, all my friends would come over and they would all bring something I had to cook a meal out of it. They wouldn’t tell each other what they were bringing or anything.”
To pull those meals together Frank used a bit of cast iron-wood stove magic.
“So every Wednesday night, I always cooked a big pan of cornbread in that old wood stove and it was always perfect once you get comfortable with it and have the right things like small pieces of wood here and bigger pieces of wood over there and that cast iron stuff. I’ve always loved that stuff.”
I will write here that Lillian, my maternal grandmother, loved that stuff too. She loved her cast iron molds and skillets. I remember what had to be one of her skillets in a unique memory that refuses to die for which I am grateful in this era of vanishing memories. The whole Walker clan went down to the river for a fish fry. The river was Georgia’s Broad River at a place called Anthony Shoals. There by white water and brown rocks Uncle Carroll scoured a cast iron frying pan with sand until it shone like silver. That pan flashed like a semaphore in the Georgia sun.
I came by cast iron frying pans too. Maybe one was the one Uncle Carroll cleaned. I came by my cast iron cornbread “stick” mold the same way. I inherited it. I’ve read that cornbread was a po white folks food that essentially made something out of nothing. Well, so what. Each time I sat down to my mother’s cornbread I felt rich. I’m happy to have her old vintage mold. It shaped cornbread and it shaped me. It makes for a fine wall hanger, a conservation piece, but it’s best work takes place in the oven. And once upon a time, a wood-burning stove.