The Corn and The Fury

The following is a true story.

When I first moved upstate, around 2006, I visited a gay bar in Albany (now closed) for their annual Holiday Party. There was table filled with trays of Little Debbie snack cakes and hot dogs. I lived in Manhattan’s East Village for about twenty years, graduated from NYU’s Film School and frequented (too) many questionable downtown “art” productions with friends in various shades of head-to-toe black attire.

My first thought when I saw the trays of snack cakes was ‘Oh, this must part of a show. This is irony. Maybe there’s a drag queen or a performance artist who is going to throw the snack cakes at the audience members. Maybe they’ll shove the hot dogs into their who-knows-where as a statement against capitalist corporate culture and animal abuse.’

That is what I was expecting, however reality was much more disturbing.

People stood at the table and nonchalantly ate the hot dogs and Little Debbie snack cakes – gay men, nevertheless! (my own people!) I was appalled! Aghast! Where was I? What decisions had I made that lead me to this point?

Dorothy, we’re not in Kansas anymore.

Or, is a table of Little Debbie snack cakes reality and I had been living in a bohemian bubble?

Page down, after almost twenty years of upstate living, a friend brought a Jiffy corn casserole dish to a potluck and I found myself rushing to the store for the ingredients!

Resistance is futile.
-The Borg, Star Trek

Today, I share with you this recipe for Jiffy cornbread casserole. Is it farm-to-table? At some point, the corn was on a farm….then a can….now, it’s on a table…so…kinda…

All six ingredients, combined in one bowl, will cost you less than $5 (at Aldi’s). You will be the hit of any potluck; people will like you. You will be the hot dish with the hot dish. Jiffy corn casserole allows Gen-Xers and mild Boomers to relive their 70s and 80s childhood memories of eating meatloaf and cornbread casserole before watching Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley, and maybe Three’s Company (I have no idea what’s on any streaming service, but I can remember the ABC Tuesday night lineup from almost fifty years ago).

Like any internet reciple, I’m going to force you to read through some bizzaro-and-not-really-related content before giving you the simple recipe that you can find almost anywhere. Torturous.

I’ll write parts of this Jiffy Corn Casserole recipe post in a first person stream-of-consciousness narration, similar to a William Faulkner novel:

Casserole! Casserole!
As I Lay Baking
The Corn and the Fury

There are plenty of comfort feelings when eating the Jiffy box corn casserole – it’s like eating a warm and corn kernel filled corn muffin besides a fireplace. You get extra points and if you bake it in a vintage American-made Corning Ware dish. Corning, New York has a story (likely a parallel to our own Hudson, New York) of an upstate city with a once thriving manufacturing economy. The road from blue collar working class town to service and tourism town has its social, political and cultural speed bumps. I’m writing random verbiage to keep you on this page longer, and help increase the length of time per page.

Why have a worn physical cookbook with an index and a table of contents and stained, easy-to-access pages with bits of dried food serving as bookmarks? Why use a real book when internet recipes are so much more annoying? Can you print this out? Is your printer out of ink? Is your printer connected to your social network?

I could install some popup software on this website to give you both completely unrelated content and ads for every item in your browser search history for the past three month.

Here’s the recipe page, (you’ll see what I’m complaining about).

You never really needed me, this recipe is everywhere.

You’ve always had the power, my dear. You’ve had it all along.
Glenda

If you want to skip the line and go right to the print-out page, here you go.