Happy New Year!
Traditionally, eating Cornbread, Collards and Black Eyed Peas
brings good luck and prosperity in the new year!
Perfect for the last nights of Chanukah. One of my favorite desserts—Almond Chocolate Olive Oil Biscotti.
Southern Style Cornbread
Tradition has it that eating black eyed peas on New Year’s will bring good luck. Add Collards and its greenness will ensure a financially good year. Jewish traditions include eating black eyed peas on the Jewish New Year. Add golden cornbread, wealth and health will fill your year. Popular throughout the South, the dish is said to have become traditional during the Civil War, especially among enslaved people. Today, it is a New Year’s tradition throughout the South! The crispy edges of the cornbread come from the preheated skillet. Northern Cornbread usually is sweetened whereas the Southern version is unsweetened—a debate that has gone on for some time! Moist and flavorful, make it part of your repertoire!
Southern Style Cornbread
4 servings
4 tablespoons vegetable oil or butter, divided
1 1/2 cups yellow cornmeal
1/2 cup flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon kosher salt
2 large eggs
1 cup milk of choice
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Preheat oven to 400 F (200 C).
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Add 2 tablespoons vegetable oil to 12” cast iron skillet. Place skillet in oven to heat for about 5 minutes. You can use a cake pan, if you don’t have a cast iron skillet. Place a baking sheet on the rack below the skillet to catch any spills.
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In a large bowl, whisk together cornmeal, flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt.
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In a separate bowl, mix eggs, milk and 2 tablespoons oil. Add to dry ingredients but do not over mix.
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Pull out rack with skillet on it. Rotate the pan so that the oil is evenly dispersed in the skillet. Carefully pour the batter into the pan, smooth out evenly and slowly push the rack back in place, being careful as the skillet and oven will be hot!
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Bake for about 20-25 minutes until the cornbread has pulled away from the edges, the center is firm and the top is golden brown. Insert a toothpick into the center. The cornbread is done when the toothpick comes out clean.
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Serve immediately with drizzled butter and/or honey. The cornbread may be refrigerated for several days or frozen for 3 months.
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Often served on New Year’s with Black-Eyed Peas and Garlicky Collards.
Expandthetable suggestions
Old fashioned: Many traditional recipes use lard or butter in place of oil and also use buttermilk. Keeping a kosher kitchen, I do not use pork products. Let me know if you use butter and how it turns out.
Milk: While buttermilk is traditionally used, I generally use almond milk in place of dairy milk and did so in this recipe as well.
Sugar: Add 2 teaspoons sugar, which is preferred in Northern-style recipes.
Bring the hostages home.
Foodie Lit
How people survive adversity and triumph despite the meanness of their lives moves our emotions. Without sentimentality, Catherine has given us that inspiration. She shared, “At a time when our media, our popular culture, and our literature seem to dwell so heavily on the negative aspects of human nature, I wanted the novel to focus—in an uplifting but down-to-earth and non-sentimentalized way—on the triumph of kindness and generosity over mean-spiritedness and the selfish pursuit of self-interest. I’d intended the stories to be sort of an antidote to the pervasive ‘gloom and doom’ with which we were being bombarded with daily.”
Catherine deftly creates her characters, realistic in their goodness and their heartlessness. She told me, “I live the lives I write about.” Hallie Jo is a life worth reading about, an inspiration for our new year.
