Jeremy Jackson has four goals:
- Make cornbread one word. Once and for all.
- Have cornbread named the official bread of the United States.
- Find a wife.
- Think outside the box of cornmeal about the Possibilities, potentialities, and promises of cornbread.
Cornbread is the American bread. The by-the-people-for-the-people bread. So it should be put forth to the people with humor. And a whole lot of butter.
The Cornbread Book does just that with recipes for cornbreads, fritters, hush puppies, and biscuits. Cornbreads of the sweet persuasion appear, too, from biscotti to pound cake. And there are yeast breads such as Anadama Batter Bread and Cornmeal Pizza Dough. Don't forget timeless favorites like spoonbread, buttermilk cornbread, and popovers. Not to mention Gospel Buns, Sweet Potato Cupcakes, and Honey Snail (which doesn't come within ten miles of an actual snail).
Cornbread doesn't even have to be made with cornmeal. Hominy-Leek Monkey Bread has riced hominy. And Jeremy is as proud as a peacock to have come up with three yeast breads made with flour he milled from popped popcorn (Popcorn White Loaf, Popcorn Pita Bread, and Popcorn Focaccia). In the unlikely event you have any leftover cornbread, Jeremy has recipes for cornbread salad, croutons, and dressing.
And if you ever meet Jeremy, he might just sing you "The Cornbread Song" . . .
Jeremy Jackson is the author of The Cornbread Book, the first cookbook devoted solely to America's bread of breads. A graduate of Vassar College and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Jeremy has written about food for the Chicago Tribune and is also the author of two novels, Life at These Speeds and In Summer. He lives in Iowa City, Iowa.
In His Own Words. . . Though I was born in Ohio, I grew up with my family on a farm in the Ozark borderlands of Missouri. We raised cattle and hay and had a garden the size of Texas. At various times we had horses, cattle, a pig, sheep, chickens, ducks, and a pony. We ate a lot of these animals, but not the pony. We also had wild blackberries and persimmons and walnuts on our farm. And a pear tree. And we caught fish in our ponds. We ate some of them, too.
For some crazy reason, I headed off to Vassar College, thinking that I would become a writer. Unfortunately, I did. It was all downhill from there, though the sex was good. From Vassar I went straight into the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where I wrote brilliant stories about bunnies, marbles, and a talking mailbox named Ruth. Then I spent a year writing a novel and a screenplay. Then I went and taught English back at Vassar for two years. Being a professor was a mind-numbing experience, though the sex was good. I quit that job and started being a writer full time, which was very much like being a writer part time except that it took a lot more time and I felt much more guilty when I didn't write anything. I moved from Poughkeepsie back to Iowa, which is kind of like moving from the outer circles of hell to the Garden of Eden. I bought a house here. It's a nice Craftsman-style bungalow. Plus there's a sauna.
In addition to The Cornbread Book, I'm the author of Life at These Speeds, a literary novel. There isn't any cornbread in the novel. Right now I'm writing a second novel. And my next cookbook, Desserts That Have Killed Better Men Than Me, is already on the way. There isn't any cornbread in it, either, mostly just butter and heavy cream.
