cornbread

 

If you’re eating at my table this summer, there will be cornbread. It will be one of two recipes: either Huckleberry Bakery’s Buttermilk Cornbread, or my friend Marie’s Perfect Cornbread. Both are bloody delightful. Huckleberry’s version is sweeter and richer, with a honey glaze. Marie’s cornbread is one you can afford to bake more often, and has a lightness to it one doesn’t often seen in cornbread, largely due to the whipped egg whites. I add fresh corn kernels to both recipes, but they’re just as great without.

In this house cornbread often gets served with pork, it’s fatty savouriness a good foil for the sweet cornbread. This weekend the pork was in the form of a belly, rubbed in soy sauce, five spice powder and lots of garlic (recipe by way of Nigel Slater), and baked. We do the crackling once the meat is cooked, a slab a time perched on two wooden spatulas, right under the grill. On the side two oven pans of roasted rapini, tossed in a vinaigrette of chopped anchovy and lemon juice and zest, and served with some Parmesan. I served five people with $3 worth of rapini. In my world that’s a bargain.

 

 

Dessert was from Yossy Arefi’s new book, Sweeter off the Vine, a rhubarb semifreddo. I’d never made a semifreddo, so that was pretty exciting, and it tastes deeply of rhubarb, which is how I like my rhubarb recipes. Don’t disguise it with strawberries or raspberries or whatever else – it defeats the purpose. The semifreddo is just eggs, sugar, cream and roasted rhubarb –  basically anyone who learnt to cook while Nigella Lawson was on television in the 90s and 2000s should have these ingredients on hand in the summer. I served it with some more roasted rhubarb on top. It is a pretty dish, but you’ll have to take my word for it – by the time we ate dessert we had all had a decent amount of wine, and the light was awful, so the pictures are all pretty gross. (You know those food bloggers that have great pictures of every party they throw? Yeah, me neither.)

 

 

 

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