YOUR MAMA'S KITCHEN

For Herb Butler, nothing brings back his childhood as much as his mother's cornbread

By Mike Leggett
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Wednesday, May 06, 2009

Times were tough in Depression-era West Virginia.

Nobody had money, but somehow they got by.

Herb Butler's parents, John Clayton and Ruhama Hamrick Butler, were like everybody else. They had no running water, but they had a milk cow. They had no electricity, but they had a garden and a pantry to store the goods. And with a passel of kids to feed, they had to learn to make things work to their advantage.

The couple shared the duties of raising the kids and the food. Corn that grew in their garden was stored in a crib, and a couple of times a year, John Clayton would load a couple of hundred pounds on a wagon and haul it eight miles into town, to Erbacon, where it would be ground into meal.

"I can remember my father taking the meal — white corn, by the way; he thought yellow corn was for the hogs — in his hand and sifting it through his fingers, just getting to the right consistency," Herb Butler, 74, said. "Of course, I would be fishing in the mill pond while he was getting the meal ground."

Working on the barter system, the miller would take part of the finished product while Butler and his dad climbed back onto the wagon to haul the corn meal back home. There, his mother would turn out cornbread that would go with almost every meal. "It's one of my fondest memories," Butler said.

"The ingredients in her recipe were all natural. Our cow provided the milk, which was kept in a spring house to keep it cool since we had no electricity. Our hens provided the eggs and our hogs provided the bacon drippings," he said.

Like other country families, the Butlers ate the hogs but guarded their milk cows like gold. "I never had a hamburger until I was much older," he said. "We ate the pigs, but your cow was your milk and your butter."

Butler's mother kept the household going after his father had to move to Ohio to find work. Until the entire family moved there right at the end of World War II, she raised the kids, grew the food, churned the butter and canned and cooked enough so that everyone went to bed with a full belly at night.

"She would make apple butter in a huge copper pot," Butler said. "It was so good. And I never got to eat fresh blackberries. Those all were canned. When we moved to Ohio about my sophomore year in high school, we carried 4,000 pounds of canned goods with us. We ate on that for a long time."

But it was his mother's cornbread that stayed with Butler. "She cooked it on a wood-burning stove so sometimes it could take 45 minutes for it to get done," he said. "You build the fire now and get the heat 10 minutes later. So she was always adjusting the fire and dampers."

She was willing to share her recipe, happy to share it actually, but that didn't mean the adult Herb Butler would find it easy to make. "She never measured anything," he said. "It was all a dab of this or a smidgen of that. It took me two or three years to finally get the recipe to taste like hers."

The secret, it turned out, was milk, lots of milk. "Most cornbread recipes call for a cup of milk for each batch," Butler said. "But I put a cup and a half in this one. That was her secret."

The result is a sweet, almost cakelike bread that takes butter perfectly and will work well with beans at dinner or preserves or sorghum syrup for breakfast. It's one worth saving.

mleggett@statesman.com; 756-8918

Mom's Cornbread

1/4 cup lard, bacon drippings or shortening

3/4 cup cornmeal

11/4 cups flour

2 Tbsp. sugar

1 Tbsp. baking powder

1/4 tsp. baking soda

1/2 tsp. salt

2 eggs

11/2 cups milk

Heat the shortening, lard or bacon drippings in a 10-inch cast-iron skillet (well-seasoned in advance) in an oven that has been heated to 420 degrees until it melts (about 10 minutes). Mix all the dry ingredients together. Gently beat the eggs with the milk. Combine dry and wet ingredients and let it set for 10 to 15 minutes. Pour the hot shortening, bacon drippings or lard into the batter and mix very gently, not too much. Pour the batter back into the hot cast-iron skillet and cook in the oven until golden brown on top (approximately 22 minutes). If you're cooking the cornbread on a wood stove, it might take 45 minutes.