A little while back a prominent blogger created a stir with cornbread and buttermilk. Seems in his world these two elements seemed to constitute a racial slur.
I grew up in the land of cornbread and buttermilk. There was nothing racial about it -- rural blacks and whites alike enjoyed the combination (maybe even some city folks, too). My 92 year old mother still loves cornbread and buttermilk. My paternal great-grandfather took two glasses of buttermilk for supper -- one straight and the last glass sweetened with ribbon cane or sorghum syrup. As for me, "water" my store-bought buttermilk down with about half sweet milk.
I grew up in the land of cornbread and buttermilk. I grew up in a land where couches were called divans, where women named Stella & Ella were called Steller and Eller, and where parents had convinced children that the leg was the best part of the chicken. Rural East Texas life was a good land to come up in. Imperfect. But good.
7 comments:
Amen. The couch could be called a settee as well. As a child I knew a Marthie(Martha) and an Olie(Ola) myself.You can never beat collard greens and black-eyed peas either.
Some of these folks should worry about much heavier matters.
Neil
Here, here!!!
I still visit the land of cornbread whenever I'm back home in Indiana. I also had a great aunt Marthy, which is the name of the Old Regular Baptist church she attended, Little Martha.
The really older folks in my childhood called it clabber, cornbread stirred up in a glass with buttermilk. Every Sunday evening. Turns out that all the clabber eaters tended to live to around 90 in good health. Of course, those folks churned up their own butter and buttermilk, too, as long as they could.
One thing I intended to mention is the once popular biscuit soaked in coffee.
I lament that some of the old terms that have fallen out of use. Once popular here were "gallery" for porch and "galluses" for suspenders. And there are many more when one starts to reminisce. And while we may not have forgotten what a "dog trot" is, most homes have long since dismissed that style.
Dad was a lover of cornbread and buttermilk, as were his parents.
I never acquired the taste for buttermilk as a drink, but I do remember having cornbread with "sweet" milk – with chopped onions.
I enjoy buttermilk, cut with a little sweet milk. But I never got addicted cornbread and buttermilk myself.
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