Southern Legitimacy Statement: Born and raised in west Georgia and east Alabama, my high school mascot was a distinguished Civil War soldier and my grandparents never pronounced the “r” in my first name. Pot likker soothed my colic and constipation, I only adopt mutt dogs that I find in parking lots, and I’ll run you out of my house if you start up about sweet cornbread.
“Southern Cornbread Dressing as described in The New Perry Hotel: A Century of Southern Hospitality, A Compilation of Memories and Favorite Recipes of Nannette Green in Her 50th Year at the New Perry Hotel by Bobbe Nelson”
Momma had two grandmothers, one savory and one sweet.
There is a Christmas dressing recipe. It is not a stuffing recipe: that’s a totally different thing. My granny made it from a recipe she learned from her mother, Granny Grass- as my Momma called her. Momma’s other grandmother on her daddy’s side was called Nanny and she made cakes. Granny Grass smoked a pipe, drank corn liquor, and had a swept yard which she wasn’t afraid to bend over and piss in. My granny could shoot pee out like a cow without getting any on herself. I’m sure she learned that in the cotton fields with her mother and it was a skill that she used often as a frequent camper and outdoorswoman.
Nanny, however, wore lace aprons paired with flawless red nails and carried a deck of playing cards. She went to church every week and had only grandsons, except for Momma—the only one who called her Nanny. A savory grandmother and a sweet one: I think we all get one of each, whether we have the chance to know them or not.
Granny had five sisters and two brothers, most of who gathered together for the holidays every year up until the mid-2000s. One of these Christmas gatherings was at malingering Great Aunt Bobbie’s house. Granny brought dressing, different vegetables, and sections of cakes from a fine German bakery. Every year before the holidays she bought a red velvet, a German chocolate with coconut and pecan icing, and some other cake. They would be split into thirds and mixed together, one trio for Aunt Bobbie’s Christmas, one trio for their house, and one trio went to someone I can’t remember. At Bobbie’s in the early 60s relatives would corner my mother, asking:
“Which one of these is your Momma’s dressing?”
Some of the same relatives would corner me at Aunt Bobbie’s in the early 90s, asking:
“Which one of these is your Granny’s dressing?”
By the time I was born, my Granny had found a cookbook with the perfect dressing recipe like her own to add to her huge cookbook collection that she kept inside one of those giant cabinets labeled “Potatoes” and “Onions.” She died after I turned fourteen and when Thanksgiving came with Christmas looming toward us, we tried to find the book.
It was gone, not in the cabinet, not in the house. And so a brain trust was formed when Momma, my brother, and myself all sat down with pen and paper to recall the dressing. We could list the ingredients, but Momma and Michael couldn’t come up with the quantities because Granny always multiplied the recipe by three. This turned two pans of dressing into six pans of dressing: the required amount for so many people and gatherings, or the required amount for a smaller group who wants to eat turkey and dressing for a long time.
“I know the recipe,” I said.
“Do you really?” Momma looked hopeful. I think she had a bit of confidence in my ability to remember, as I had long been able to “rattle off “things I had read before.
“Yes, I can see it in my mind with Granny’s written pencil marks next to each thing.
9 cups of crumbled corn bread
9 eggs
6 cups of white bread crumbled
15 cups of chicken stock
salt and pepper
poultry seasoning
6 cups of chopped onions
3 cups of chopped celery
1 and ½ cups melted butter”
The instructions and the baking time and specifications are intuitive, as is always the style in Southern cooking. This is how you get recipes with a “large cup” of this and a “scant cup” of that and even secret ingredients cooks intentionally hide to ensure the uniqueness and quality of their food over others.
Years after we’d been making the dressing twice a year with my reconstructed recipe, I found the book in cache of old cookbooks that had been packed away in tattered cardboard boxes. I had remembered it correctly, save the amount of poultry seasoning listed—that’s something we always changed because Granny had a heavy hand with seasoning the dressing, although she didn’t get as aggressive with the garlic in her big buttered red potatoes for the holiday table.
I still make this dressing, though every grandmother is long dead, including my own mother. It’s made with the small numbers because we don’t need six pans of dressing. It is my hope that one day I will need to make six pans of dressing and that I’ll have a reason to hunt up some of those humongous metal mixing bowls that Granny used and then Momma used after that. My brother took them somewhere, claiming he wanted to use them, but this was another of his personal fantasies, great and small. Never to be seen again, like the Christmas ornaments I made as a child that Momma and Daddy kept up with for years (as well as several other incredible ornaments: a huge Santa head with soft and beard, a few floppy reindeer who sat in the branches of the tree—It was my job to put them on and I got to play with them (just a little, gently) before they went on for the season.
Michael would always take things for himself, like furniture he wanted or pans and bowls that held great significance to the rest of us. Of course he deserved them as much as I did, but he left them scattered all over the country. Shelves in Montana, tables in Alaska. He pawned the alto saxophone I had through middle school and high school when I lent it to one of my nephews to use in his band classes. I try not to dwell on these betrayals, but they return to me again and again.
We were on the phone in the recent past and I told him,
“I never thought you’d do that to me.”
His response was the same as the fabled scorpion riding the frog’s back:
“You know what I’m like.”
It’s harder for me now than when I was growing up to reconcile all the different betrayals of my life. Momma didn’t allow anyone but me to attend my high school graduation. Michael made promises to visit but left me to deal with Momma’s triple bypass surgery and the lasting infection afterwards. When I was in graduate school at the University of West Georgia, still raw and not yet twenty, he came to stay with us for a year or so and told me he was shocked at how the awful way Momma and I spoke to each other.
“Why is she so mean to you, Kimberly? Do we need to take her to the doctor for these changes in behavior?,” he asked.
I laughed loud and long, wiping tears from my eyes.
“She’s fine, Michael. This is how she’s always talked to me anytime you’re not at home. She’s only nice for you, you know. I just give it right back because I can’t just absorb it and do nothing.”
“Well, I’m going to leave if she can’t act better than that.”
This sent me into one of my first autistic meltdowns as an adult. I cried so much I got dehydrated and had to be put to bed. I begged him not to leave then because the blame would fall on me and the next three months would be a living hell. Any good or bad thing in my family always took about three months to mete out, just like a tarot card reading that shows you three months in the past or future.
And so I still mourn the family that I had, but I’ve stopped mourning the family I could have had. I can now love them for who they were and not who I needed them to be. I hold the recipes, some of which are even written down in Momma’s handwriting kept in the wooden box she kept them in. The rest are in my mind along with the stains and spoon marks on the pages.
