I'm thrilled to have my dear friend Mandy of Off the Beaten Shelf, guest post for me today! Her wit and southern accent are impossible to miss in this piece as she shares a southern family recipe that I can attest to being absolutely delicious! Enjoy!

You should’ve seen the look on my mother’s face when I told her I was running off to Ohio to marry a boy from the Midwest. 

Or rather, since we’re from the South, she knew him better as “a damn Yankee.” 

For months after I moved from Birmingham, Alabama, to Columbus, Ohio, my mother would pepper me with questions about my new home. 

“Are you freezing to death up there?”

“No, mother, it’s only about ten degrees colder than Birmingham right now.”

“How do you drive up there on them icy roads?”

“The same way you do when roads ice over in Alabama: slowly and carefully and as little as possible, if you can help it.”

I’d only moved to a different state, but to her I may as well have moved to The North Pole. 

The questions continued until one day she asked, “What do they eat up there?” 

Exasperated, I replied, “Jesus Lord, mother, the same thing anybody eats!”

But after we got off the phone, I realized that wasn’t entirely true. My partner and I cooked the same meals in Columbus that we cooked in Birmingham when we ate at home, though I started to realize my in-laws’ definition of certain meals was vastly different than my own. This was never so true than with the classic Midwestern staple: corn. 

You’d expect Midwesterners to know a thing or two about corn. The prevailing stereotype about the region is that it’s covered in corn fields and that Midwestern folks are all stocky since they’re so, well, corn-fed. Ask anybody who calls the Midwest “flyover country” why they refer to it as such and they’ll blame the corn. 

In the months after we moved to Columbus, my mother-in-law endeavored to make us feel welcome by cooking dinner for us at least once a week. And she insisted I tell her about any foods I missed from the South so she could try to recreate them. 

Being from the corn-fed Midwest, I challenged her to make cornbread. 

As any good Southerner knows, cornbread ain’t cornbread if it ain’t made in an old cast iron skillet and don’t crumble all over hell and creation when you eat it. Cornbread isn’t a gussied up dinner roll––it’s something you mash up into soup or stew. 

I should’ve known something was wrong when my mother-in-law served the cornbread in a 9x12 baking pan and it looked like yellow cake without icing. 

My likening it to cake wasn’t far off. It was like yellow cake with cornmeal instead of sugar, though it was a tad sweet. In truth, it tasted pretty good, though my kin would disown me for saying that. 

Mostly, I couldn’t get over how fundamentally differently she thought of cornbread. To her, cornbread wasn’t something to be crumbled into the main course, but a side dish all its own. Unlike a Southerner, she didn’t see cornbread as a vehicle to sop. 

Before that, I’d never thought to question the purpose of cornbread. It makes sense now––you cook the food according to how you want to eat it. 

You’d think I’d have learned my lesson and would clearly explain my vision for any corn-based meals after that. Yet, this past Thanksgiving I offered to make the corn casserole and my mother-in-law asked if she should pick up creamed corn. 

Creamed corn? In a corn casserole? Lord help these damn Yankees!

(Maybe she meant corn pudding and was just confused?)

To be fair, corn casserole is open to slightly more interpretation than cornbread and even Southerners have recipes that vary. To my mother-in-law, corn casserole is more like cornmeal mush. A side dish that’s minimally spiced and is prone to collapsing and spreading out all over the plate. 

It’s telling that I have yet to eat at any restaurant here that serves it as a side dish.

The Southern corn casserole I grew up eating is solid and flavorful, nearly a whole meal unto itself. And it’s easy to make:

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees.

Get two small bags or one large bag of Mahatma Yellow Rice and cook according to the directions on the package.

While that’s cooking, mix the following into a large mixing bowl: two cans of sweet whole kernel corn, two small cans of cream of broccoli soup, and at least one bag of cheddar cheese. More if you really like cheese.

Optional: you can put some chopped bell pepper in there if you want to get fancy.

Remove the rice from the stove once nearly all of the water has been absorbed, but the rice isn’t totally soft yet. Mix it into the bowl with the other ingredients. 

Mix well and pour the contents into a baking pan you’ve sprayed down like your mama taught you. Sprinkle more cheese on top.

Optional: sprinkle some crispy French’s onions on top too.

Cook on 350 until the top is browned, usually about 25-35 minutes. It ain’t bad a little burnt. 

Now, that’s a corn casserole.

I shouldn’t gloat at the compliments my Southern corn casserole received over the Thanksgiving table, though it didn’t escape my notice that the most enthusiastic compliments all came from native Midwesterners. 

At least now if someone asks me what they eat up here, I’ll have the satisfaction of telling them that at least some of these damn Yankees have now eaten a proper corn casserole. 

Mandy Shunnarah is an Alabama-born writer who now calls Columbus, Ohio, home. Her essays, poetry, and short stories have been published in Electric Literature, The Rumpus, Entropy Magazine, Mizna, The Normal School, The Citron Review, Heavy Feather Review, and others. Read more at mandyshunnarah.com and check out her book blog at offthebeatenshelf.com.