{"id":567,"date":"2018-01-29T23:52:40","date_gmt":"2018-01-30T04:52:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.fayegibbons.com\/?p=567"},"modified":"2018-01-29T23:52:40","modified_gmt":"2018-01-30T04:52:40","slug":"bile-them-hoe-cakes-down-boys","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.fayegibbons.com\/?p=567","title":{"rendered":"BILE THEM HOE CAKES DOWN, BOYS"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"IMG_1466\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Daddy holding John in Savannah, GA about 1943. John was perhaps 6 months old.<\/strong><\/h2>\n

 <\/p>\n

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My latest book, HALLEY, awarded 2015 Jefferson Cup Honor for Historical Fiction, awarded the Moonbeam Silver Medal for Young Adult Fiction,\u00a0 and awarded the 2016 Frank Yerby Award for Fiction.\u00a0 Available at: NewSouth Books:\u00a0www.newsouthbooks.com\/halley and Amazon<\/strong>.<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n

I\u2019m a southern girl, and I\u2019ve heard of hoe cake all my life.\u00a0 And I thought I knew what it was\u2014cornbread baked in a large skillet, right?\u00a0 Wrong!\u00a0 It took my Yankee daughter-in-law to set me straight.<\/strong><\/h3>\n

It all started in early January when I decided to cook a special meal for our son David, his wife, Aca, and their three boys ages 4-7.\u00a0 Since they\u2019d all been sick with first one bug and another the entire month of December, I decided to make a good basic beef stew with potatoes and other vegetables and serve it with some of my late mother-in-law\u2019s fried cornbread.\u00a0 The recipe is strange.\u00a0 It calls for boiling water over plain ground cornmeal.\u00a0 It has no egg and no milk and very little oil (or bacon drippings).\u00a0 The batter is fried in a slight amount of fat.<\/strong><\/h3>\n

My meal was a hit, and Aca asked for the recipe for the stew and the \u201choe cake.\u201d\u00a0 I of course told her that this wasn\u2019t hoe cake\u2014it was fried cornbread.\u00a0 When I told her how it was made, she said, \u201cBut isn\u2019t that hoe cake?\u201d<\/strong><\/h3>\n

When I looked it up, guess what?\u00a0 It was hoe cake!\u00a0 Google said the legend passed down is that it sometimes was fried on a hoe when no other utensil was available, but that most people think this is just a made-up folktale.\u00a0 I myself doubt that you could keep the grease on a hoe long enough to cook a corn pancake. But what do I know?\u00a0 I only just now learned what hoe cake is!<\/strong><\/h3>\n

I recall another simple bread from my childhood.\u00a0 We only got this when my mother was sick or just recovering from childbirth so that she was too disabled to drag herself to the kitchen stove.\u00a0 On these occasions Daddy would say, \u201cWell, I reckon I can cook.\u00a0 They learned me in the army.\u201d\u00a0 They didn\u2019t \u201clearn\u201d him much else\u2014Daddy did a lot of KP duty because of his refusal to conform to military discipline.\u00a0 Probably only VE day saved him from a dishonorable discharge. If Daddy had any money in his pocket on those days when he took over Mama\u2019s job, he would go to the nearest store and buy a couple pounds of bacon.\u00a0 He would throw all of it in the largest iron skillet Mama had and rev up the fire in the stove.\u00a0 While this cooked (stirring with a fork every now and then) he would mix a batter of flour, melted lard, and a can of evaporated milk.\u00a0 There was no recipe, as far as I knew.\u00a0 Then he would pour this into another iron skillet with about a half inch of lard\u2014or bacon grease, if there was enough cooked out of the tangle of bacon slices\u2014and put it on the stove to cook (or \u201cfry\u201d might be a more apt word).\u00a0 To complete the meal, he would break a dozen eggs or more into a bowl and whip them up to scramble in bacon fat.\u00a0 The meal was always good, and, though I\u2019m sure his fried bread wouldn\u2019t hold a shuck to my mother\u2019s biscuits (which were the best bread ever) it tasted mighty good to us kids.\u00a0 But what wouldn\u2019t taste wonderful with four or five slices of crisp bacon?<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Another bread from my childhood did not leave such pleasant memories\u2014crackling bread.\u00a0 Cracklins were the crispy bits of pork skin and fat which was cooked down in a wash pot until the fat was rendered.\u00a0 You might not believe it, but fresh, hot, and crispy right out of the pot, a cracklin was a delight better than fried chicken, potato chips, or any other crunchy, fatty junk food you could think of.\u00a0 But, when packed in grease to be stored and later cooked in cornbread through the winter, they were definitely not good.\u00a0 I always liked plain cornbread fine, but when my grandmothers poured in a generous handful of cracklins, the resulting \u201cbread\u201d was heavy, greasy, and, as the winter dragged on,\u00a0 increasingly rancid.\u00a0 I had a stomach of iron in those days, but I drew the line at cracklin bread and the heartburn I knew would follow.<\/strong><\/h3>\n

So if you\u2019re having me for a meal, pass the hoe cakes and the bacon\u2014you can keep the cracklins!<\/strong><\/h3>\n
<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Daddy holding John in Savannah, GA about 1943. John was perhaps 6 months old.   My latest book, HALLEY, awarded 2015 Jefferson Cup Honor for Historical Fiction, awarded the Moonbeam Silver Medal for Young Adult Fiction,\u00a0 and awarded the 2016 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.fayegibbons.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/567"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.fayegibbons.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.fayegibbons.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.fayegibbons.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.fayegibbons.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=567"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blog.fayegibbons.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/567\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":570,"href":"https:\/\/blog.fayegibbons.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/567\/revisions\/570"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.fayegibbons.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=567"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.fayegibbons.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=567"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.fayegibbons.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=567"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}