During my stint living in Georgia, I developed an irrational envy over my friends’ regional holiday recipes, passed down through the generations and served at every Thanksgiving and Christmas. Sweet potato pie, cornbread dressing, collard greens. My editor was kind enough to write down her grandmother’s biscuit and cornbread dressing recipe for me to try. The gist was one recipe biscuits, one recipe cornbread, onions, hard-boiled eggs and turkey broth. I followed the instructions to the word, but the dressing was a flop, probably because I didn’t have an accumulated lifetime of biscuit-making experience—mine turned out flat and tough. Also, I didn’t yet know that you should always, always make from-scratch turkey for Thanksgiving stuffing.
Once I moved back to Ohio, I was determined to find some Midwest-centric recipes to add to my Thanksgiving table. The pickings were slim. I found a few wild rice stuffing recipes, but wild rice isn’t all that common in Ohio and anyway there’s no way I’m trading in my fluffy white bread stuffing for rice stuffing. I did end up adding a corn casserole to my repertoire. But my favorite discovery was a lovely Ohio Thanksgiving story about a little girl whose mother made persimmon pudding each year with perfectly ripe persimmons plucked from a backyard tree! I wrote about it for The Midwestival.
modwestfood.com 