Along the Way: Making miracles on the old woodstove

A good friend wrote the other day that during the Depression, his supper often consisted of cornbread and milk.

I appreciated the image he conveyed, but the hard-times metaphor was neither jarring nor austere.

Because at Mary Edith Erwin’s table, cornbread — especially old cornbread — was turned into a spectacular dish.

Once upon a time, miracles were made on woodstoves.

And to one little kid with a weird nickname, what my grandma did with cornbread (sometimes harder than a brick after a few days) was flat-out un-BEE-lievable.

She called it “push-kush.” I am spelling it phonetically. It was a sort of soup, or soup-y pudding. And it was a treat beyond description.

Mary Edith (in the language of the realm, southwest Missouri, it was pronounced “EDD-ith”) was an authentic kitchen magician.

Her frontier upbringing taught her that nothing, most notably food, should ever be wasted. And in Grandma’s cookroom, it wasn’t.

This amazing little lady would prepare a Sunday dinner, for example, and everything placed on her tablecloth would show up at the next meal ... and the next ... and the next ... until it vanished.

Her fresh-from-the-oven cornbread was merely delicious. But in its final appearance a day or so later, as push-kush, it was magnificent.

The heart’s divine perfumes record no finer fragrance, and the taste was even better.

What went into Grandma’s push-kush was a secret she took with her to delight the angels. Beyond salt and pepper, onions and celery and bits of bacon, I have no idea what she used. Chicken broth, maybe, or good old Missouri well water.

It required creative skill handed down from the frontier, to be sure.

But the first ingredient was cornbread which, after a few days, I seriously doubt that you could drive a nail into. “Hard” doesn’t begin to describe it.

Somehow she broke it down and eventually it would bubble and burble into that pioneer porridge so delectable.

Mary Edith Erwin was just a bit rounded — that is to say, stooped in the shoulders — by the time I knew her. I doubt that she ever used makeup, but she was beautiful. And a big smile was always there, ready to break out on her face, lined with maturity.

She’d stroll around the house humming or singing church hymns (“Shall we gather at the river, where bright angel feet have trod ...”) or a tune that was probably on the Top 40 when she was a girl (“I wandered today to the hill, Maggie, to watch the scene below ...”).

Her husband, my Grandpa, was a blacksmith and backwoods preacher. He was well-fed, I hasten to add, although he was tall and trim throughout the nearly 90 years he spent on this side of life.

So many lights turn on and nudge the memory when I think of this simple, wonderful couple.

None more pleasing than the marvelous munchy my Grandma made from yesterday’s — or last week’s — cornbread.

My friend who wrote to me about his Depression remembrances would have chosen a different hard-times metaphor, I’m sure, if he had ever feasted on Mary Edith Erwin’s push-kush.

Former Tucson Citizen columnist Corky Simpson writes a weekly commentary for the Green Valley News.