Mexican Cornbread Layered Salad

August. The shift is subtle but you can feel it — the light is a different gold by five in the afternoon, the cicadas are louder than they were two weeks ago, and the squash bugs are out in numbers that mean I've been losing the war on them and not winning it. I picked off about a hundred this morning into a jar of soapy water. The jar is the way Cherokee gardeners have controlled squash bugs for as long as there have been squash bugs and Cherokee gardeners, and the soap-and-water in a jar is essentially the same method, only the jar is plastic now and was a coffee can before that and a clay pot before that. The method is older than the container.

Made kanuchi for the first time in a couple of months. The hickory nuts I gather in the fall need to be pounded in a mortar — Hannah's mother's mortar, the one we got when she passed, the one that has the worn smooth bowl from forty years of pounding before us — and the pounding is a thing you do for an hour and you don't rush. The flavor of kanuchi is in the pounding. You pound the nuts and the meal is fine, and the fines and the oil go into water and cook, and what comes out is not quite a soup and not quite a porridge but something that is itself, that has its own category, that tastes like the woods and the fall and a thousand years of Cherokee kitchens. I served it with bean bread to Hannah. She closed her eyes when she ate it. That's the test. If she closes her eyes, the kanuchi is right.

Caleb came Saturday. Pulled fence with me on the north line. He's gotten faster — six weeks in he knows how I work, he doesn't have to ask which tool, he just hands me what I need before I reach for it. We had lunch at the kitchen table at noon. Hannah was at Elohi. I made grilled cheese on bean bread. Caleb laughed. He said: you ever just make a grilled cheese on regular bread? I said: yeah. He said: I want to see that someday. I said: come on a different Saturday. He said: I will.

Lily came up from Tahlequah Sunday with a pile of work she was trying to escape from. She does this sometimes — she shows up at the kitchen table with her laptop and her papers and works for three hours while Hannah and I do whatever we're doing, and the company is the point, not the work. Some of the language curriculum she's been developing is for kids Tommy's age — pre-K Cherokee immersion — and she was working on the structure of a workbook. I read a page. The Cherokee for "I am hungry" was on the page, in syllabary and in romanization and with a little drawing of a child holding a bowl. I said: Tommy will use this. She said: that's the goal. I said: I want a copy when it's done. She said: of course you'll get a copy. We worked and she worked and Hannah came home at four and we ate leftover kanuchi and bean bread for supper and Lily drove back to Tahlequah after dark.

That Sunday table — Lily with her syllabary workbooks, Hannah coming through the door at four, the leftover kanuchi warm on the stove — is what I keep thinking about when I make this salad. Bean bread showed up at almost every meal that weekend, because it belongs at almost every meal, and this cornbread layered salad carries that same spirit: corn as the base, beans threaded through, everything stacked in a way that rewards the person who digs all the way down. It’s not kanuchi and it’s not bean bread, but it’s the kind of dish you set in the middle of a table full of people who aren’t going anywhere for a while, and that’s enough.

Prep Time: 25 minutes | Cook Time: 25 minutes | Total Time: 50 minutes | Servings: 10

Ingredients

1 box (8.5 oz) cornbread mix, plus ingredients listed on box
1 packet (1 oz) taco seasoning, divided
1 lb ground beef or ground turkey
1 can (15 oz) black beans, drained and rinsed
1 can (15 oz) pinto beans, drained and rinsed
1 can (15 oz) corn kernels, drained
1 cup sour cream
1 cup mayonnaise
1 cup shredded sharp cheddar cheese
1 cup shredded Monterey Jack cheese
1 cup cherry tomatoes, halved
1 green bell pepper, diced
4 green onions, thinly sliced
1 can (4 oz) diced green chiles, drained
1 cup shredded romaine lettuce
1/2 cup sliced black olives
Salt and black pepper to taste

Instructions

Bake the cornbread. Prepare the cornbread mix according to package directions, stirring half the taco seasoning into the batter. Bake in a 9-inch pan or cast iron skillet, cool completely, then crumble into bite-sized pieces.
Brown the meat. In a skillet over medium-high heat, cook the ground beef or turkey until no longer pink, breaking it up as it cooks. Drain excess fat, then stir in the remaining taco seasoning and 1/4 cup water. Simmer 3—4 minutes until the liquid absorbs. Let cool.
Mix the dressing. In a small bowl, whisk together the sour cream and mayonnaise until smooth. Season with salt and pepper.
Build the first layer. Spread the crumbled cornbread in an even layer across the bottom of a large, deep bowl or 9x13 inch dish.
Add the meat layer. Spoon the seasoned ground meat evenly over the cornbread.
Layer the beans and corn. Combine the black beans, pinto beans, and corn kernels, then spread them over the meat layer.
Spread the dressing. Dollop the sour cream and mayonnaise mixture over the bean layer and gently spread to the edges to seal.
Add vegetables. Layer the green bell pepper, green onions, diced green chiles, and cherry tomatoes over the dressing.
Top with cheese and olives. Sprinkle both cheeses evenly over the vegetables, then scatter the black olives across the top.
Finish with lettuce. Add the shredded romaine as the final layer. Cover and refrigerate at least 2 hours before serving, or overnight. Serve cold, scooping through all layers with a large spoon.

Nutrition (per serving)

Mexican Cornbread Layered Salad — The Table That Held Us All