A lady at the office recently organized a “Southern Style” cook-off at the office and the outcome was surprisingly good. Along-side the usual artery clogging delicacies was the organizer's own cornbread. It was sweet and moist with pieces of real corn in it, not the gritty stuff you get at restaurants who think they know what cornbread is.

The taste of the cornbread was incredibly evocative for me, taking me instantly back to my grandmother's kitchen. It was cluttered and possibly unsanitary, but the concoctions crafted therein were culinary masterpieces, the like of which I have never again encountered. Her daughter, my mother, was also a good cook, but there was something about grandma's kitchen.

Grandma made fried chicken that was crunchy on the outside and juicy on the inside, and you couldn't even tell it was fried in recycled grease. She made lemonade, real lemonade, that was sweet but not cloying, and tart but not bitter. And then there was the cornbread. The smell of it portended good eatin' to come, and I would crowd at the kitchen barrier, intended to keep the various dogs out of the kitchen, to catch a glimpse of the mysterious alchemical process of its creation. It was so sweet, it qualified as a pastry. I'd pay large dollars for a pan of Grandma's cornbread, right now.

Grandma lived in a small town about a 45 minutes from where I was raised. It had a main drag called “Church Street” that had everything of mention into the entire community. There was the large “estates” of the local notables, the school, the pecan processing plant, and the grocery store where my grandfather worked as a butcher.

And, of course, the church.

I would occasionally spend weekends with my grandmother, and we would invariably stroll up the sidewalk every Sunday morning to take our places in the small country church. There might have been 12 pews, and the attendance slate on the wall listed its congregation at something like 150, although I never saw that many people. The preacher was a roundish, genial, red-faced man with a beautiful red-haired daughter. I had a crush on her for years.

The hymnal was a a thin brown book, with frayed corners. If you turned to page 124, you'd find “What A Friend We Have In Jesus”, which I knew by heart. Grandma got me to sing it in front of the congregation once when I was nine or ten, and I think I did a passable job. Everyone was certainly complimentary, but then I suppose that's what you get in a place like that.

It was maybe four years later that I was back in the small meeting hall, just outside the chapel, among aging aunts and competing Tupperware platters of deviled eggs and potato salad. We had gathered to bury her. After all that grease and sugar, it was cancer that got her. Go figure. We'd grown apart in my tweenie years, but I missed her greatly. The sad KFC-fare some well-meaner has inflicted upon the wake only served to illustrated the magnitude of the loss. At least no one had committed the sacrilege of substandard cornbread.

Mom never got the recipe for the cornbread, and so it is gone forever, like Atlantis and the secrets of the pyramids. And Grandma. I don't know if souls are eternal, but it's hard to imagine that something as powerful as all that can be ephemeral. Is she still somehow with me, watching over me? Is she in some kind of advanced state for those with big hearts and magic rolling pins? I can't even imagine what something like that would be like.

But I think I know how it would taste.

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