Butterbeans and Cornbread

A couple of days ago, as I was leaving Charlotte's, I stopped by Honeybaked Ham to buy a ham bone.  A big chunky ham bone, it turns out, with lots of ham left on it.

I knew I had some of those fresh-frozen butterbeans (y'all call them lima beans in Texas)e in the freezer that you get in the produce section at Central Market. And a pint of buttermilk.  And some Bob's Red Mill medium grind cornmeal.

So I--who had just announced at Charlotte's birthday party that I'm retiring from cooking--made myself proud and cooked a pot of butterbeans and some cornbread hat would, as we say in Georgia, "make you want to slap your grandma."  If there's one meal that makes me homesick, this is the one!

My parents always made cornbread with self-rising cornmeal, buttermilk, oil and egg.  I can still see them standing there in the kitchen together, my daddy making cornbread, my mama stirring butterbeans--or vice versa.  Then they poured the batter in a cast-iron skillet and cooked it and you slathered butter over it while it as hot--and YUM-MEE!

For the cornbread, since we don't have self-rising in Texas, I used Bob's Red Mill and followed the recipe on the bag except I used the whole pint of buttermilk.  It also uses flour and I followed the recipe and used it--though Southern cornbread doesn't use flour.  Next time I'm going to try it with all cornmeal, no flour, but this recipe is great just as it is.

So I guess I'm going to postpone full retirement from cooking just a little longer.