Butterscotch Pudding, Adapted from David Lebovitz

With wonderful local milk, we sometimes make Butterscotch Pudding for Cornbread Suppers. David Lebovitz, former pastry chef at Chez Panisse and presently a cookbook author and food writer who lives in Paris (the one in France), developed and published this Butterscotch Pudding recipe.

You can cook the Lebovitz recipe just as printed and have good success. Here are ways we have tweaked it:

1. I have doubled and (almost unheard of) quintupled this recipe, cooking it in a slow cooker to avoid all the stirring. I do stir a lot, but I know it won't burn, at least. The end result is usually lumpy and weird in texture, and then it become silky smooth after I blend it for about 30 seconds (in batches) in my blender. Awesome.

2. As written, the recipe is unnecessarily sweet. Cut the brown sugar to a rounded 1/2 cup, and it seems wonderfully balanced.

3. For flavorings, lots of options. We have replaced the whiskey with vanilla. We have used two teaspoons each of Bourbon, dark rum, and vanilla. All are delicious. The whiskier version may give parents pause a child food, so sometimes we just use vanilla (which, of course, is itself alcohol - but not MUCH alcohol.)

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Boone Tavern Spoon Bread, the 1950s recipe

We have tried spoonbreads (soft, luscious, buttery—described by James Beard as a "heavy, dense soufflé") as Cornbread Supper mainstays before, and used great recipes, but the spoonbreads always did what spoonbreads (and soufflés) do: deflate. Through serendipity, and thanks to a Cornbread Supperian, I lucked into the old Boone Tavern (Berea College) recipe for spoonbread, and it is far less droopy. Perhaps Boone Tavern developed an approach to spoonbread that preserves all its goodness while still working for a busy restaurant. In any case, with thanks to Kentucky food and foodways author and guru John van Willigen, here's an excellent recipe for that can be doubled, tripled, and quadrupled to feed spoonbread to a crowd. It did just that on Monday, February 25, 2013. From Richard T. Hougen. Look No Further: A cookbook of favorite recipes from Boone Tavern Hotel, Berea College, Kentucky. New York: Abingdon Press. 1955. Southern Spoon Bread 1955 Ingredients 3 c...

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Cornbread Supper now is resting

For all the Cornbreadians and would-be Cornbreadians -- it was a good run. A bit more than nine years. You came on Mondays. Conviviality ensued. You made community. Gratitude to all. It was a gift to us.

Cornbread Supper

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