LITTLE ROCK — Corn bread is old as the idea that corn must be good for something, new as the latest recipe, and hot as the Arkansas Cornbread Festival on Saturday at the Bernice Garden in downtown Little Rock.
“It gets everybody talking about what kind of corn bread theirs is,” Liz Sanders says as coordinator of the garden’s first corn bread cookoff. The event will challenge professional and amateur cooks alike to turn out the best example of this true Southern tradition.
Besides pleasing the judges, each of the 40 contestants is supposed to make enough corn bread to give everybody a taste- everybody being a crowd of, oh, say, 1,000.
But then, the question is what makes for the kind of corn bread of which Mark Twain said, “ Per-haps no bread in the world is quite as good.”
The highest? The crunchiest? The golden-brownest-ontoppest?
The sweetest?
Whether or not corn bread has to be sweet is an issue at least as heated as whether or not chili is required to have beans. Another question: Um! - wouldn’t some chili (beans or not) and corn bread (sweet or un-) hit the spot? Chili will be among the probable side dishes available at the festival. Beans, too.
Sanders votes that corn bread doesn’t absolutely, necessarily have to be sweet. What it most of all has to do - and does - is bring people together.
“Everybody loves corn bread,” she says. “I have experienced corn bread culture enough to know that people get really excited about it.”
Cornbread can be served on the rich man’s linen tablecloth, at the cowboy’s campfire, and so why not here? - in the midst of an unlikely garden that turns one corner of a concrete intersection into a place of art and nature.
GARDEN OF EATIN’
The 3-year-old Bernice Garden “is a different idea,” Sanders says. “It’s a community garden, but it’s privately owned” by Anita Davis.
The 2,850-square-foot lot retains the parking space of its former tenant, a fast-food fish restaurant. But the yo-ho-ho is gone, replaced by a landscape of native Arkansas trees, grasses and flowers, and a growingcollection of, so far, six permanent sculptures.
The latest project is a new roof on poles in the center of the garden, a shelter with lighting and other features bound to be appreciated by musicians and flowers. The festival will have bluegrass, blues and gospel, Sanders says. The roof is designed to “catch rain water and channel it to the plants.”
Just to the south is the new Boulevard Bread Co. and coffee house in the red-brick BerniceBuilding, from which the garden takes its name. Across the street is The Root Cafe with its focus on local produce.
The area has become a neighborhood that Sanders, 26, is happy to call home, waving to friends in a scatter of red and yellow fall leaves.
She holds a degree in anthropology from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. The study took her to then-peaceful Yemen to dig for relics, and to France to dig the French wayof life. Now, she says, the background makes her appreciate her surroundings at home.
The garden is a place where people can “enjoy each other’s company, enjoy being outdoors, and enjoy being surrounded by thoughtful art from Arkansas artists,” she says.
And, of course - enjoy corn bread.
TRUE GRITS
Call it corn bread, johnnycake, hoecake, corn pone (purists know the difference, but most people just know it’s good); make it in an iron skillet with bacon drippings, in a muffin pan with cooking spray; stir honey in it, cheese in it, jalapeno peppers in it. Make it from a grocery store mix, even, just don’t count on the $500 prize.
Categories hint at the range of corn bread to anticipate, including sweet corn bread, traditional and the mysterious “nontraditional” corn bread in both divisions - professional, meaning restaurant expertise, and amateur, meaning nobody else comes close to grandma’s recipe.
“If people like it,” Sanders says - and who doesn’t like corn bread? - plans are to dish up second, third and more helpings of the Arkansas Cornbread Festival as a way to support the garden.
“We’ll have it yearly.” The Arkansas Cornbread Festival will be 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturday at the Bernice Garden, southeast corner of South Main Street and Daisy Bates Avenue in downtown Little Rock. Admission is $5 for adults, $3 for children ages 6 to 12, free for children ages 5 and under. More information is available at
arcornbreadfestival.com, or by calling (501) 617-2511.
High Profile, Pages 43 on 10/30/2011