Mrs. Anderson's Cornbread
Gluten free and fancied up.
The Story
From about 1985-89, I worked in New York City for a nonprofit called the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board. My job was to train tenants how to run low-income housing cooperatives.
Mrs. Anderson served as the treasurer for one of the Harlem cooperatives I worked with. The first time I met her, she was perched high up on a ladder painting her kitchen ceiling bright pink.
While slapping on the nearly fluorescent paint, she gleefully told me that she was in her 70s, but her boyfriend, a plumber, was past 80. She seemed to find everything about her situation delightful and hilarious.
The next time I visited Mrs. Anderson, she had cooked me a huge spread: fried chicken, biscuits and gravy, smoked pork shank and black-eyed peas, greens, and cornbread.
I remember sitting down to this feast and wondering how I would ever eat enough to demonstrate proper appreciation. But Mrs. Anderson just beamed at me with joy through the entire meal, and I realized that’s what it was about.
Before we stopped working together, Mrs. Anderson gave me her cornbread recipe. I typed it on an index card on my Olivetti electric typewriter which seemed very futuristic at the time. Mrs. Anderson’s recipe was my introduction to making cornbread in a hot cast iron skillet.
Shambhavi’s Gluten Free Cornbread
Around the time that I met Mrs. Anderson, I discovered that I was allergic to gluten. So here’s my current cornbread recipe. Not especially southern, but still cooked in a cast iron skillet!
Ingredients
2 cups corn meal
2 cups almond flour
1/2 cup pumpkin seeds ground into a flour-like consistency
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt
4 eggs
1/4 cup maple syrup
1 cup nut milk, buttermilk, or just milk. If you like softer, more cake-like cornbread, you can add more milk or milk substitutes up to 2 cups.
5 tablespoons melted butter or ghee
1 tsp vanilla
Instructions
Put a 10” cast iron skillet in the oven. Preheat to 350 degrees.
Mix the dry ingredients in a bowl. Whisk together all wet ingredients, except for 1 tablespoon of the butter, and fold them into the dry ingredients.
Remove the skillet from the oven and put it over a medium-low heat on the burner. Heat the remaining butter in the skillet. Pour in the batter. Let the batter cook for a few minutes on the stovetop until the sides begin to set.
Move the skillet back into the oven and cook until the top is firm and bounces back to the touch, or a knife inserted into the center comes out clean. Approximately 20 minutes. (I never time it!)
Options
For a lighter, dryer cornbread, substitute some millet flour for some of the almond flour.
Add some shredded coconut!
Use olive oil or melted coconut oil instead of ghee or butter.
Let’s discuss cornbread, southern-style
#justforfun
Landon Bryant
@landontalks