Lately, I've been thinking about (and eating) cornbread. It goes so well with chili and various other messes o' beans. It is so easy to dress up. Throw in a few pine nuts and some fresh rosemary and suddenly it's not poverty cooking, it's cucina povera!
And then I ate some gingersnaps and starting wondering what would turn my cornbread recipe into gingerbread. Turns out, my cornbread doesn't go there, but I did find, in a huge collection of gingerbread recipes, a WWI-era recipe for cornmeal gingerbread. I've been fiddling with it ever since. Those old recipes assume quite a bit of knowledge. No pan size, no baking temperature, no nothing. But I have done it all for you! The experiments generally turned out well, as witnessed by the general NOM-NOM-NOM reception by Oz and various friends. And me. Like, "Is this gingerbread dry?" NOM-NOM. "Hmm. Let me try another piece."
Cornmeal Gingerbread
1 cup cornmeal OR 3/4 cup corn masa
1 cup wheat flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
3/4 teaspoon salt
2 to 4 teaspoons ground ginger
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon cloves
1 cup buttermilk (or milk, but buttermilk is better)
1 cup molasses
2 tablespoons oil, or melted butter or shortening (butter is my favorite)
1 egg
Preheat oven to 350 °F. Butter an 8 by 8 inch baking dish.
In a large bowl, combine the dry ingredients, either by sifting them together or stirring them gently with a fork.
In another bowl, beat the egg. Beat the melted butter into the egg. When the butter is evenly mixed and somewhat emulsified by the yolk, stir in the molasses and then the buttermilk. Add the liquid ingredients to the dry. Stir until just blended and pour into buttered dish.
Bake for 35 to 40 minutes, or until a knife or toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.
The resulting cake is very moist and flavorful. Goes great with coffee, would probably go great with whipped cream and vanilla ice cream if it lasted long enough for us to go out and get some.
Cornmeal vs. corn masa: Corn masa is tortilla flour. It is more finely ground than cornmeal and yields a more smoothly textured cake. If you substitute a whole cup of corn masa for the cornmeal, the cake will be a bit on the dry, dense side (but still edible). Use 3/4 cup of corn masa and get a tender, moist cake.
Ginger: 2 teaspoons of ginger gives you more of a molasses/spice cake flavor. 4 teaspoons of ginger gives you a cake where the ginger dominates all the other flavors. Your truth may lie somewhere in between.
Molasses: I used second molasses (very nice flavor). The grocery store didn't have blackstrap molasses (very aggressive flavor), which is what I usually use for cooking. When you buy molasses, be sure to check the label and make sure it is 100% molasses, and not corn syrup flavored with molasses.
Where I'm working we have this huge Manual that tells us how to do our jobs, down to the most miniscule detail. The Manual has accreted a couple thousand pages, give or take, over the many, many years that the organization has been operating. The idea was to cover every eventuality, in a world of ever-changing eventualities. Someday, some final Procedure will be added and the Manual will collapse into a deranged wave function and start absorbing everything in the immediate vicinity. Oh! Happy day indeed, for everything not in the immediate vicinity. One hopes this happens while one is on vacation.
In the meantime, we get tested on the Manual regularly, this being the only way to advance to the next level in the organization.
During training, we are taught how to apply the procedures in the Manual, how to search the Manual electronically, and how to interpret what the damn thing is actually saying. The interpretation part of the process has led to the (waxy yellow) build-up of much Dogma about how to apply the rules in practice and a number of extraneous, time-consuming procedures to effect such application.
Then there is a third layer of received wisdom about just how much of the Manual and the Dogma one must ignore. If everyone practiced the procedures of the Manual as written, or even as mitigated through the waxy haze of the Dogma, the entire organization would grind to a halt and collapse into an even worse wave function. Vacation would not be enough to save one.
The third layer involves closed doors, lowered voices, occasional fingertips pressed across lips and shushing noises. The transmission of the third layer begins with , "Okay. So I know They told you to [tedious process], but you can [skip it]." The end of the transmission is always "Don't tell Them I told you."
So far I've worked under a few different people and I've noticed much consistency across the [tedious process]/[skip it] combinations. (Amazing when you consider that no one ever tells anyone anything.) Still, you occasionally get someone who hews a little closer to the nominal procedures, and you have to be prepared to do things how they want. You don't get to do things how you want (or make up your own rules) until you've passed the Final Test on the Manual.
Today I was meeting with the current person who has utter control over my life and employment situation. We had more of the "Skip that. Don't tell." in one hour than I had heard in the past six months. "Leave this out, leave that out, all you have to do is this [little thing]. Don't bother with [rather important thing (or so I had gathered from the Manual)] at all."
My eyes got wider and wider.
He said, "Don't worry. They never catch me and They won't catch you."