Cereal - a bushcrafters staple?

[Janne]

I ave eaten the US catfish, and Wels Catfish in Europe, plus the various carps.
Very similar taste.
Not like a minnow, not at all!
Catfish and carp are bottom feeders.
Hence what some people perceive as a ‘muddy’ taste of the carp and Wels Catfish

Yep, they have bones, but if you know where they are it is not a problem. One row of thin ones as an ’extra’ plus the stabdard fish skeleton design
Pike is worse. Freshwater bream the worst.

I know exactly where the bones are on all European freshwater and saltwater fish, so seldom get a bone in the mouth unawares.
Freshwater fish was my main food on my treks before we moved to UK.
No fish was too small for me!
Last time we had catfish (US) we swore through the meal. We do not know the anatomy.

 

[Robson Valley]

The cornmeal is 'way better than cereal.
You can double up and have a skillet full of corn bread in just a few minutes.
Use more of it on the fish. I don't care for blackened. I can do it but not a treat.

 

[Janne]

The only fishing I spent big money on to catch was Salmon. ( Salmo Salar) A day card in the best Scandi rivers is not cheap, never was.

Never got one.

In Europe cornbread is exotic.
First time I tasted it I thought it was a lovely cake to a cup of coffee. Sweet, cinnamon, honey to be poured on top ( that was what they instructed me to do when I asked how to eat it)

 

[santaman2000]

....In Europe cornbread is exotic.
First time I tasted it I thought it was a lovely cake to a cup of coffee. Sweet, cinnamon, honey to be poured on top ( that was what they instructed me to do when I asked how to eat it)

Real cornbread ain’t sweet.
- 1 cup corn,earl
- 1 cup flour
- 1 tablespoon baking powder
- 1 raw egg
- 1 tablespoon cooking oil
-1 & 1/2 cup to 2 cups milk or buttermilk (if using buttermilk, add another teaspoon of baking soda)
- pinch of salt (optional)

Mix all dry ingredients then add wet ingredients and mix again. Place in a well greased pre heated cast iron skillet or muffin pan and place into a 425 fare height oven for 25 to 35 minutes.

Use as bread to eat alone or sop up gravy and/or vegetable pot liquor. May also be crumbled into a glass of cold milk for a night time snack.

Variations:

1) Instead of pouring batter into a pan to bake, pout it into flay cakes (like pancakes) onto a hot griddle (this version is known as “Johnny cakes” or “hoe cakes”)

2) drop rounded spoonfuls of the batter into hot grease to deep fry (this version is known as hush puppies and is traditionally served with fish and seafood)

3) Add some combination of jalapeños, corn kernels, diced bell peppers to the batter before coking (this version is known as Mexican cornbread)

4) add fried pork rinds to the batter before cooking (this version is known as cracklings bread)

NEVER under any circumstances should cornbread be sweet.

 

[Janne]

Here it is sweet.
Eaten with fried Chicken, Jerk Chicken, Jerk Pork, Fried Fish.

I guess made like this.
https://jamaicans.com/cornbread/

 

[santaman2000]

I ave eaten the US catfish, and Wels Catfish in Europe, plus the various carps.
Very similar taste.
Not like a minnow, not at all!
Catfish and carp are bottom feeders........

Tase isn’t the issue. It’s the texture and the bones. Catfish fillets are simply thick, succulent and flaky meat. Smaller catfish (called “fiddlers”) are skinned live then beheaded and gutted before being fried whole. Even these are relatively boneless. Merely rake the flakey meat off th spine with your fork.

 

[santaman2000]

Here it is sweet.
Eaten with fried Chicken, Jerk Chicken, Jerk Pork, Fried Fish.

I guess made like this.
https://jamaicans.com/cornbread/

That ain’t cornbread. That’s some yankee imitation.

 

[Janne]

Carp is at least a couple of kilos when harvested.
Traditionally not filleted, but cut innsteaks and pan fried, or prepared ’wet’ using vinegar.
Nobody used to eat them has an issue with the bones. Meat of carp flakes the same way as the Wels Catfish, but it is somewhat fattier, unless the carp has been defatted by letting live in a cage in a stream.
That treatment ( up to a couple of weeks) leans it up, firms up the flesh and removes most of the ’muddy’ taste.

My fathers mothers family used to own a large lake where they grew carp, and all of it was treated like this in a nearby river ( Vltava) where they had a mill. They ’cleansed’ them in the deviated river arm leading to the mill.

 

[Janne]

That ain’t cornbread. That’s some yankee imitation.

Caribbean. No yankees here, ever.
Well, they had a couple of stations around here after the US joined in the WW2 fun.
Food culture here in influenced from the Spanish, British, Indian, Chinese ,French and west African food culture.
Depending on which island, which colonial power.
Jamaica makes the best grilled chicken and pork I have ever tasted.

 

[santaman2000]

Caribbean. No yankees here, ever.
Well, they had a couple of stations around here after the US joined in the WW2 fun.
Food culture here in influenced from the Spanish, British, Indian, Chinese ,French and west African food culture.
Depending on which island, which colonial power.
Jamaica makes the best grilled chicken and pork I have ever tasted.

Without Southerners form the US there’s no real cornbread. We invented it. Or at least the Cherokee And Choctaw did and passed it down (the English colonists added the flour and leavening)

 

[Janne]

Or invented in todays Mexico, where corn originates?
Traditional Mex cornbread is also sweet.

Maize spread to the Caribbean islands very soon after it became ’created’ in Mexico.


Anyhow, we will never know for certain.

It is virtually impossible to find out about origins of many dishes, they have been evolved over centuries by various people groups, mixed, separated, ingredients added and removed....

The Jamaican Beef Stew is a mix of a central american dish and Hungarian Goulash, and the Goulash receipe was brought to Jamaica by the Bohemian ( Czech) Brotherhood/ Moravian Church.

Did deep and we see a wonderful mix and cultural sharing across borders.

 

[santaman2000]

Nope. The native Mexicans invented masa. Much, much finer grind than cornmeal. Fantastic for tortillas though. By the way, tortillas also aren’t sweetened either although you’re correct, Mexicans generally have a sweet tooth. That seems ironic considering the original Mayan hot chocolate wasn’t sweet at all. It was a bitter drink made with water instead of milk and often had a bit of cayenne pepper added. (I stil like a bit of cayenne in my hot chocolate)

 

[Janne]

Well, they had no cows to give them milk. Not sure if their domesticated animals gave them milk?
Llamas?
The Sami had Reineer milk, and the first ‘white’ pioneers there used Moose milk if they managed to kill a lactating Moose.
Cows came to northern Sweden quite late, the inlands were populated by non Sami people well after the Norse age.

Masa is just one maize preparation. Anyhow, I think we can agree on that Cornbread was invented in North America, by the indigenous people, millenia before the idea of countries or borders came.

I guess you know that Corn Flakes were invented by an american religious zealot as an anti masturbation food? He thought it acted as a libido suppressant.

Dr Kellog.

 

[Robson Valley]

I like a hit of Mexican chocolate, every once in a while.
All doped up with sugar and cinnamon.

I use a corn bread recipe that I got from Tabasco/McIlhenny. No sugar.
If I want sweeter, it needs molasses or jam. Really is a breakfast treat.
I confess that I was a little kid, growing up in the corn state of Iowa.
Corn taste is branded into my brain.

The starch grains in corn starch, corn flour and corn meal do not soak up water like wheat starch does.
So anything corn-based is bound to be drier and crisper. Deep fry batter, corn cereal and so on.

Maize is genetically related to a really big grassy, Teosinte.
What happened in the original cross pollinations, nobody know for certain, even now.
At the time of European contact, native americans were cultivating 5 basic corn types,
from coast to coast and right up into the New England states in the NE.
Flour corn, dent corn, flint corn, sweet corn & popcorn.
In about 1910(?) Buffalo Bird Woman described the 9 kinds of corn that she was growing.

 

[Janne]

Btw, in Jamaica they still do a kind of water based, bitter cocoa drink.
They start either with raw fermented cacao beans or ( more common) get already prepared ( ground up and compressed into inch wide balls)
Usually sweetened with unrefined sugar.

I got introduced to those ’cacao balls’ by a foodie Jamaican patient.
They are very fresh, not like the commercial cacao powders.
We can buy them here too, in little mom and pop shops that cater for our Jamaican workforce.

The taste is ’raw’, intense. Like a locally made wine in the center of Sicily vs the stuff that comes from Australia.

I believe strongly in Cultural Appropriation of food.

 

[Janne]

There is a weed here, that looks like a miniature Maize. The seeds are also organized like a corn cob. About one meter high. Multiple stalks per plant.

Personally I am not a Corn ( maize) person. Rye and Barley are imprinted in my tastebuds and DNA.

I am ok with grilled corn on the cob. Rememberthe first time I had it. 1966 in Romania.

 

[santaman2000]

There is a weed here, that looks like a miniature Maize. The seeds are also organized like a corn cob. About one meter high. Multiple stalks per plant.

Personally I am not a Corn ( maize) person. Rye and Barley are imprinted in my tastebuds and DNA.

I am ok with grilled corn on the cob. Rememberthe first time I had it. 1966 in Romania.

Growing up it was common for us to have some form of corn (cornbread, grits, cooked corn, etc) at almost every meal. It was literally the single most important crop in the Western Hemisphere.

 

[santaman2000]

Well, they had no cows to give them milk. Not sure if their domesticated animals gave them milk?
Llamas?

......I guess you know that Corn Flakes were invented by an american religious zealot as an anti masturbation food? He thought it acted as a libido suppressant.......

The Mongols still milk horses.


Dr Kellog had so many eccentricities we’d never be able to list them here. His sanatorium has been the basis of many a movie.

 

[Lou]

The mongols? You can buy mare's milk in French supermarkets.

 

[Janne]

Growing up it was common for us to have some form of corn (cornbread, grits, cooked corn, etc) at almost every meal. It was literally the single most important crop in the Western Hemisphere.

Not in Europe. Wheat. Rye, and in the old days, Buckwheat, Spelt and Millet
(Europe is in the Western Hemisphere...)

Lou, how does it taste like?