opinion
The other day, while holding a wooden spoon to my mouth to taste the texture, season and consistency of my grandmother’s cornbread dressing, my significant other popped into the kitchen to ask, “What goes in that stuff, anyway?”
“I can’t tell you,” I told her, “'cause then I’d have to kidnap you.”
This is the trite expression we would-be cooks, and upholders of family tradition, use to make us sound like we know what we’re doing when we are bumbling around the kitchen, foolishly trying to emulate those who came before us and replicate recipes passed down for generations.
Though I do enjoy cooking, now and again, there are only two things I manage to get right most of the time:
My grandmother’s cornbread dressing — with an assist from a “Joy of Cooking” 1957 edition I pilfered from a stack of books left by a colleague at The Anniston (Ala.) Star in 1991 — and my own mother’s red beans and rice, which she claimed to have constructed upon listening to a PBS program featuring the late, great “Cajun” legend and chef Justin Wilson.
As to the original question, “What goes in that stuff, anyway?” I can’t say for certain, because it depends on the year, the mood and, well, life itself.
Recipes aren't etched in stone
Some years, I might decide to blitz the sage, say, or cut back on the celery. This year, since I’m making three batches, in one I decided to double down on my Louisiana roots by adding just a few slices of jalapeño pepper.
“Cajun cooking,” Justin Wilson told The Associated Press in 1990, “is the ability to take what you have and create a good dish and season it right.
“It isn't all that hard, but so few people know how to take what they have and put it together and season it properly,” he said. “It’s creative cooking — that’s all it is.”
Indeed, the freedom of a chef in a kitchen, whether in Louisiana, in North Jersey or on the Amalfi Coast, to feel the “joy” of “deviating” from original is as liberating as it gets.
Heck, that’s the only way my Scots grandmother, Lena Sistrunk, ever made anything. She never wrote it down, even basics like heat and salt. “It was all in her head,” my Aunt Shirley once told me about a family biscuit recipe. There was only "a pinch of this" or "a spoonful of that.”
I take this approach in my own cooking, if not in word then at least in deed.
Paper smeared with cinnamon
I have a turkey chili recipe I adapted from Mark Bittman’s green-covered edition, “How to Cook Everything Vegetarian.” Except now the page is worn, and has been nearly pulled from its staples. It’s filled with enough scratch-outs and rewrites to resemble the scribblings a 3-year-old might make with a box of crayons.
It’s a ruthless exercise that carries something of a journalistic quality, in that it reminds me of the way an editor would desecrate my raw copy when as a cub reporter I would return to the office, after navigating the “cop run,” and pound out a 9-inch story on a fire, or even a murder, only to have it feel the wrath of the blue pencil.
In my view, cooking recipes, no matter their provenance, are meant to be “living documents.” They are no good unless they’ve been smeared with cinnamon or chocolate syrup. They can be written on, mutilated, discarded or adapted in any way one sees fit.
When I’m cooking cornbread dressing — which I’ve made at least three dozen times, and every time different — the amount of cornmeal, or buttermilk, or broth is liable to change, according to what’s available.
Or, to paraphrase former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, sometimes you have to “go to war” in the kitchen with what you have on hand, not what you wish you had.
In truth, there can be great delight in not having, or not remembering exactly, and simply muddling through, looking in half-bare cupboards, imagining what might taste great together.
That’s what’s fun about cooking, why it can be such a release.
The kitchen, I find, whether prepping for Thanksgiving, or boiling an egg, is a safe space, a place absent of judgment or quarrel or control, a place where the cook, novice or pro is free to make a mistake — and then, in the spirit of good ‘ol Justin Wilson, laugh about it out loud.
Bruce Lowry is the opinion editor for NorthJersey.com, where this column originally appeared. Folllow him on Twitter: @brucelowry21
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/11/28/thanksgiving-meal-cooking-recipe-column/4320674002/
2019-11-28 09:00:00Z
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