A
miller's craft
Photos and text by Penny Sanford
Published
in The Winona Times
January 31, 1985
A 1901 cookbook, The Picayune's Creole Cook Book, boasts "the only people who know how to make corn bread are the Southern people, and the further you go south of the Mason and Dixon's line, the better the corn bread, corn cakes, and corn muffins, that will be offered to you."
But what your tastebuds are so fondly remembering at this moment is not true Southern cornbread. Even the bread cooked by your mother may not have been genuine Southern cornbread. Original Southern corn bread is made from white corn and is stone-ground on a gristmill, and there is only one place in Montgomery County to get the cornmeal for making genuine Southern corn bread.
James Tollison of Winona is a third generation miler, and he has been actively involved with his family's gristmill since he was six years old. His grandfather once used steam to power a gristmill, but Tollison now uses electricity, the most cost-efficient source of power for his gristmill. But whether powered by steam or volts, the ancient process is still the same.
Two
mammoth round rocks, each weighing 200 pounds, grind the grains of corn into cornmeal.
One huge rock remains stationary while the other turns. The stones must be sharpened
periodically, and the process is something of an art form that takes both skill
and tremendous patience.
Tollison spends a full day sharpening each rock,
a craft passed from father to son.
Grinding the corn to get the proper
texture of conmeal also requires a "feel" for the task.
"(The
rocks) have to run a certain speed to do a good job. You can run them too fast,
and they're dangerous. Those rocks can burst if you run them too fast," Tollison
said.
James Tollison
is a third generation miller.
The gristmill he uses today dates from 1954
and runs on electricity.
His grandfather used steam to power his mill.
The cornmeal available on the grocery shelves is ground between steel rollers, a process, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, which removes the corn husk and germ almost entirely. This process takes away the personality of hte cornmeal and some food value. The ancient method practiced by Tollison produces a coarse meal with a richer flavor.
"I fix it like the people wnat it. I can take the bran out or leave it in; I have an attachment on my mill now. They used to go home and sift it to take that bran out. You'd be surprised that some of them still want (the whole grain) in there," Tollison said.
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