Molasses Cornbread For Zora Neale Hurston

In her upcoming cookbook Baking in the American South, author Anne Byrn shares the story of this special Molasses Cornbread for Zora Neale Hurston:

The Harlem Renaissance novelist Zora Neale Hurston was born in the wintertime of 1891 in Notasulga, Alabama, back when Southerners harvested sweet potatoes and butchered hogs using the frigid temperatures as a natural refrigerator. At hog killings, the women made a hot lunch for the workers, wrote Fred Opie in his book Zora Neale Hurston on Florida Food, roasting sweet potatoes and baking hot cornbread with molasses, which makes it sweet and dense like a square of pound cake. 

According to the late Valerie Boyd in her biography of Hurston, Wrapped in Rainbows, when Hurston was nine months old, her mother gave her a piece of cornbread to placate her while she went down to the spring to wash collard greens. The door to the cabin was open, and in came a hungry sow lured by the smell of the child’s cornbread. Pulling up to a chair to escape the sow, Hurston never crawled again. "I just took to walking and kept the thing a'going." Before modern ovens, molasses cornbread was steamed in an iron pot set over the hearth. This recipe, adapted from Opie’s book and an 1892 Florida Agriculturalist bulletin, blends old and new.