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Old South Style or Greens, New South Style
    *
    Mashed Potatoes
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    Sliced Garden Tomatoes and Cucumbers
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    Blackberry Cobbler

L ISA C ONE ’ S M AMA ’ S C ORNBREAD
    M AKES 8 WEDGES
    Mary Cone was at various times in her life a dirt-poor east-Texas Depression-era child, a flirtatious and feisty young woman, a mother, and a businesswoman. By the time I knew her, she was an old lady, a compulsive mystery reader and crossword addict. She was also helping out and being helped by my friend, her daughter Lisa, at Waterfall Hollow Farm in Berryville, Arkansas, the family’s pasture-finished natural beef business (www.waterfallhollowfarm.com).
    The last time I visited the farm, which was also the last time I saw Mary, she wrote out for me the cornbread recipe she had grown up on. It is thin and crisp, ideal for crumbling into stews, chilies, and buttermilk.
    1 cup stone-ground white cornmeal
    ½ teaspoon baking soda
    ¼ teaspoon salt
    1 egg
    1 cup buttermilk
    2 tablespoons mild vegetable oil
    1. Preheat the oven to 450°F.
    2. Quickly combine all ingredients except the oil in a large bowl, whisking well.
    3. Put the oil in a 10-inch cast-iron skillet and heat the skillet, either on top of the stove or in the oven. When the skillet is good and hot (“the oil should be smoking,” Lisa told me), pour in the batter.
    4. Now, here’s the unusual part: Let the poured-in batter sit in the skillet for 20 minutes on a heat-proof surface. Then, transfer the skillet to the oven and bake the cornbread until it is brown and crusty, 20 to 25 minutes.

W HITE R IVER C ORNBREAD
    M AKES 8 THIN WEDGES
    Arkansas has several distinct bioregions. Across the state from the hilly Ozarks (in Arkansas’s northwest corner), to the east and a bit to the south, are the flat, moist lands just above the Mississippi Delta. In 1980, the Arkansas Symphony Guild produced a fund-raising cookbook called Concerts from the Kitchen , which contained “Cornbread for Georgetown, Arkansas.” This tiny community (present population 129; population in 1980, 75) is on the White River. “This recipe originated with an old cook employed on a nearby plantation,” noted the book’s author, Marilyn Criner. The original recipe called for “fat,” presumably bacon drippings, but I use butter.
    2 tablespoons butter, mild vegetable oil, or bacon drippings
    1 cup stone-ground white cornmeal
    2 tablespoons unbleached white flour
    ¼ teaspoon baking soda
    1 teaspoon baking powder
    ½ teaspoon salt
    2 eggs
    1 cup buttermilk
    1. Preheat the oven to 425°F. Place the butter in a 10-inch cast-iron skillet and place the skillet in the oven.
    2. Combine the cornmeal, flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt in a large heat-proof bowl and stir well.
    3. Beat the eggs and buttermilk together in a medium bowl. Add them to the dry mixture and whisk a few times.
    4. Carefully remove the hot skillet from the oven. The butter should be smoking. (If it isn’t smoking yet, continue heating it on the stove until it is.) Pour about half of the hot butter from the skillet into the bowl containing the batter. Set the skillet down, whisk the batter just until the ingredients are combined, and immediately pour it into the hot skillet.
    5. Return the skillet to the oven and bake the cornbread until it is firm to the touch but not brown on top, 10 to 15 minutes.
    6. Turn the oven to broil and broil the cornbread for a few minutes, watching closely, just enough to brown the top slightly.
    7. Serve hot, cut into wedges.

    A N E XCELLENT P ROVIDER
    Every part of the corn plant—the second most plentiful cereal grown on earth for human consumption—serves us in some way. The husks of corn are traditionally used in making tamales, the kernels for food, the stalks for cattle and hog food (silage), and the silks for medicinal tea. You can fry in corn (corn oil), bake with it (cornmeal, of course), snack on it (popcorn, tortilla chips), sweeten with it (corn syrup), thicken with it (cornstarch), and