This post is the first of a series called "Breadhead Bookshelf" in which I review bread books in my collection that I think belong in your collection, too.
I decided to reward myself after grading all my history finals AND putting in the herb garden with a treat I haven't had in years: corn fritters. I first encountered them at the Heart of Illinois Fair in Peoria, Illinois. There was a church group that had a stand selling corn fritters, made fresh before your eyes, and they were exquisite. If you don't know what corn fritters are, they are fried bits of batter (very similar to an eggy waffle batter) with corn kernals mixed in. They are usually rolled in granulated or powdered sugar and served warm.
I decided to reward myself after grading all my history finals AND putting in the herb garden with a treat I haven't had in years: corn fritters. I first encountered them at the Heart of Illinois Fair in Peoria, Illinois. There was a church group that had a stand selling corn fritters, made fresh before your eyes, and they were exquisite. If you don't know what corn fritters are, they are fried bits of batter (very similar to an eggy waffle batter) with corn kernals mixed in. They are usually rolled in granulated or powdered sugar and served warm.
I had never made corn fritters before, so I decided to go old school and look in my cookbooks before resorting to the Internet. The Joy of Cooking had a recipe for corn fritters with a very small amount of batter mixed with corn and fried in a pan---probably very traditional somewhere in the U.S., but not what I was looking for. I found the right recipe in a book by Jeremy Jackson titled The Cornbread Book: a love story with recipes (William Morrow, 2003.)
Jeremy is my kind of cookbook writer: witty, casual, slightly irreverent without being sarcastic, and passionate about his subject. Plus, he's really done his homework: his first chapter is titled "A Pithy and Perfunctory History of Cornbread in these United States," and he starts with "7,000 years ago, some mopey bloke was slumping by his fire somewhere in the highlands of Mexico" and takes you all the way through Columbus, the failed Roanoke Colony, Huck Finn, Thoreau, American cookbooks of the 1700's and 1800's, cornbread during the two world wars and the Jiffy box. Whew!
The book has brief but useful sections on ingredients and equipment, but it's the recipes that will dazzle and eventually entice you to fire up the oven and get out a cast iron skillet: Sweet Cornbread, Ozark Cornbread, Gem and Pearl Breakfast Muffins, Gold Nugget Popovers, Velvet Spoonbread (!), Popcorn Focaccia (!!), Choco-Corno-Espresso-Almondo Biscotti (!!!) Uncluttered pages and clear, detailed instructions make this a book worth buying and using regularly.
Jeremy is my kind of cookbook writer: witty, casual, slightly irreverent without being sarcastic, and passionate about his subject. Plus, he's really done his homework: his first chapter is titled "A Pithy and Perfunctory History of Cornbread in these United States," and he starts with "7,000 years ago, some mopey bloke was slumping by his fire somewhere in the highlands of Mexico" and takes you all the way through Columbus, the failed Roanoke Colony, Huck Finn, Thoreau, American cookbooks of the 1700's and 1800's, cornbread during the two world wars and the Jiffy box. Whew!
The book has brief but useful sections on ingredients and equipment, but it's the recipes that will dazzle and eventually entice you to fire up the oven and get out a cast iron skillet: Sweet Cornbread, Ozark Cornbread, Gem and Pearl Breakfast Muffins, Gold Nugget Popovers, Velvet Spoonbread (!), Popcorn Focaccia (!!), Choco-Corno-Espresso-Almondo Biscotti (!!!) Uncluttered pages and clear, detailed instructions make this a book worth buying and using regularly.
I don't have permision to share his corn fritter recipe (although I'll work on that) but I thought you might like to see them being fried . . .
...and the finished product, which were enjoyed by my fellow monks at haustus tonight, but even more by me!
Mmmmmmm . . .
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