April 5th, 2021
Since I went back and forth on how to address you I’ll start with a bit of awkwardness mixed with my inherited vernacular,
Ma’am,
I want to thank you.
My name is Justin Cox and I’m a North Carolianian who now resides in New England. My family and I moved here in May 2019 as I was called to serve as minister to a small rural church in Vermont. There’s been a lot of “adjusting” the last 2 years as you might imagine. I’m getting to know my congregation and they are beginning to get to know me. They’re introducing me to local town hall meetings, long winters, and maple syrup. I in turn am helping to show them that not all Baptists are Southern Baptist (I just happen to be a Baptist who is southern). Getting familiar with folks in a new place is a challenge even for a minister, but when you add in trying to do this during a pandemic a whole new mess of obstacles pop up.
This is where you show up for me in the story of my congregation in VT.
During the summer/early fall last year when the pandemic had really sat in I started having some real hankerings for what I knew as “southern food.” More so, I would describe it as pining for the food that came from the kitchen of my grandmother. I missed pintos, collard greens, okra, biscuits, and cornbread. All of this led to an early morning where I stepped out of what is our library in the parsonage and made my way down to the kitchen to make soup stock. What I did in the kitchen that morning has been happening every morning since; I cook and bake and chase the ghost of flavors that haunt my remembered upbringing. Some of those “haints” are hard to chase down, my grandmother's “pinched” biscuit recipe was one of them. She never showed my mother how to cook because she believed that “if I show you how to make this you’ll get stuck making it the rest of your life.” There’s a lot to that statement. Needless to say my inspiration for recipes has led me to search through a lot of cookbooks. It was an interview with Travis Milton that I first read your name and it was then that I purchased a copy of your book Shuck Beans, Stack Cakes, and Honest Fried Chicken.
It was your cornbread recipe that broke me. I had been trying for months to come close to my grandmother's recipe. I tried Edna Lewis’ take, Sean Brock, and several others. All fine and good, but not quite “home” for me. It was early one morning when I decided to give yours a go. I used cornmeal from Guilford Mills, a place not far from the tobacco farm I grew up on.
Ma’am, I knew when I took it out that it was going to be close. I knew when I flipped it out of the skillet and onto a plate that it was going to have a taste I associated with my childhood, my upbringing, my grandmother, and all the roots that I associate with “home.”
That early morning while my spouse and our daughter slept upstairs, I, a 40 year old man in a union suit, cut a piece of cornbread in the kitchen, tasted it, and openly wept from the goodness of it. That cornbread, you, gave me something I hadn’t had in a long time. It, and you, also helped me in naming “who I am and where I come from” to the people I’m getting to know in my new community.
Since that day, and I mean everyday, I cook and bake and I take southern/Appalachian cooking to my Vermont neighbors. I’m known as the pastor who “preaches” in between his baking. I’m the minister who shows up on front porches(in my mask of course) with jam cake and fresh made biscuits. Doing this has helped me be a pastor to people as I am literally feeding them with the things I love. Sharing a table, breaking bread, all that imagery is spiritual to me. My experiments in the kitchen every morning have become a new way for me to pray and to gift folks with something that will hopefully offer them a better understanding of what makes me, well, me.
So, ma’am, Ms. Lundy, thanks from this son of Appalachia. Thanks for helping me see food as realized prayer. Thanks for helping me learn to feed people in a way that I know how.
Rev. Justin Cox,
United Church of Lincoln, VT