Preparations

It's a mantra, beans and corn, beans and corn. Like most kids I hated lima beans, but especially baby limas are now one of my favorite things. So buttery and sweet. If dried beans are old I do soak them, otherwise I don't care how long they take to cook, as the stove is going anyway. If I'm pulling out all the stops, going for the perfect bean (though I know perfection is beyond my grasp) I mince a large onion and cook it with some salt-pork, add the beans, chicken stock to cover, and set it on the off edge of the stove. A normal day, I'll let it cook for 8 or 10 hours while I read and muddle about, adding more chicken stock as needed. At the end of the day I need to make cornbread: a cup of cornmeal, baking soda and powder, an egg, two tablespoons of powdered milk and water. If you make this in a six-inch skillet it's more cake-like, in an eight-inch skillet it's more a pone. Pone I define as a flat cake. You can spend hours reading what various varieties of cornbread are called in different areas of the country. Nomenclature is interesting. I spent several hours with the Dictionary of Americanisms that McCord had rescued and sent me from Bowling Green. Preservation became the issue, with all the grains. If you extracted all of the oil, and the germ, it keeps quite well. Or you could malt it and make whiskey. Now, though, I can get very good cornmeal, whole grain, but I have to keep it in the freezer. I wrote these people, Logan Turnpike Mills, about needing a finer corn flour and they immediately sent me a sample of their masa. I made pancakes, and realized (the pancakes were very good, with sorghum molasses) how close I was getting to a tortilla. Non-leaven bread. It's a Jewish Catholic thing. Fish sticks on Friday. According to the Catholic church a rabbit fetus is not meat. Nor are barnacles, which hatch in the far north as geese. When you start to think about whiskey as condensed corn you start to get the picture. Weak beer and cider are certainly better than dirty water.