Professor Butter Beard and Thomas Cole’s “Scene from The Last of the Mohicans”
“Your young white, who gathers his learning from books and can measure what he knows by the page, may conceit that his knowledge, like his legs, outruns that of his fathers’, but, where experience is the master, the scholar is made to know the value of years, and respects them accordingly.”
― James Fenimore Cooper, “The Last of the Mohicans”
The Ghost of Christmas Past has been taking command of my dreams. To be more specific, dreams of a long-ago life with my father, who very recently passed on towards his next journey. In those dreams, I giggle at my father as he expertly untangles the strings of lights for the fresh holiday tree in our den while we listen to “A Little Night Music” and “Oliver” and the latest Goodyear Christmas album featuring the King Family Singers. We share plates of buttermilk pancakes and bacon, drowning in maple syrup, as we enjoy our bi-weekly Saturday morning diner breakfasts before crisp haircuts at his favorite barbershop. And we gather in front of the large console television every Sunday evening at 8pm, my brother and I each in our own rocking chair, as the theme from “Masterpiece Theater” begins and sweeps us into another world of mystery and adventure.
I vividly remember “The Six Wives of Henry VIII” and “Upstairs Downstairs” and “I Claudius,” but my absolute favorite was “The Last of the Mohicans.” My father would sit forward in his chair, gather my brother and me a little closer, and scare us with a grab every time the Huron chief Magua would emerge from the trees. The 1972 eight-episode serial is considered by many people to be the most faithful and the best of the various film and TV adaptations of James Fenimore Cooper’s “The Last of the Mohicans,” as well as one of the best of the BBC's Sunday literary adaptations. Long before Daniel Day-Lewis promised us all “I will find you,” Kenneth Ives charmed us as Hawkeye, the rugged frontiersman and unexpected guardian of the two beautiful Munro sisters – Cora and Alice.
My father’s passion was American history – especially the Seven Years' War (1756–1763), an international conflict between Great Britain and France, which had a brutal front in North America known by the Anglo-American colonists as the French and Indian War. The British sought to expand into territory claimed by the French in North America, leading both the British and the French, and their respective Native American allies, into battle for control of prime territory. This was the world James Fenimore Cooper captured within his historical novels of Hawk-Eye and Chingachgook, and also the world painted to perfection by one of my father’s favorite artists: Thomas Cole.
Famous for his unparalleled portrayals of the American wilderness, Thomas Cole was the founder of the Hudson River School. Born in Bolton le Moors, Lancashire, England in 1801, Cole immigrated with his family to the United States in 1818, settling in Steubenville, Ohio. At the age of 22, he moved to Philadelphia and later to Catskill, New York, where he lived with his wife and children until his death in 1848.
According to his historians, he was largely self-taught as a painter, relying on books and studying the work of other artists. In 1822, he started working as a portrait painter and later on, gradually shifted his focus to landscape. In the spring of 1825, Cole made a trip up the Hudson River to the eastern Catskill Mountains. Based on his sketches there, he executed three landscapes that a city bookseller agreed to display in his window. Colonel John Trumbull, already renowned as the painter of the American Revolution, saw Cole’s pictures and instantly purchased one.
According to historian Tom Gurney, what Trumbull recognized in the work of the young painter was “the perception of wildness inherent in American scenery that landscape artists had theretofore ignored.” Cole was soon welcomed into New York’s cultural community, which included the poet and editor William Cullen Bryant and the author James Fenimore Cooper.
Cole aspired to what he termed a “higher style of a landscape” that involved narratives including biblical and literary subjects, such as Cooper’s popular “Last of the Mohicans.” Cole went on to paint five canvases portraying highly emotional well-known scenes from the book depicting the adventures of Hawk-Eye, Chingachgook, Alice and the doomed Cora and Uncas. My father’s favorite, and also mine, depicts Cora kneeling at the feet of Tamenund, an ancient, wise, and revered Delaware (Lenape) sage, who had outlived three generations of Native American warriors. The emotional moment is meticulously portrayed, but for me, it will always be subordinate to the sweep and majesty of the surrounding Catskill landscape.
My father and I would discuss Hawkeye and Chingachgook, James Fenimore Cooper and the works of Thomas Cole again and again as we sat around our grandmother’s dinner table. She would let us talk on and on as she quietly filled the table with steaming plates of sliced ham, sautéed green beans, mashed potatoes and baskets of fresh-from-the-oven corn muffins. Just this morning, I woke from another ghostly visit and a dream of that very dinner table, and as my morning coffee perked, I reimagined and updated those muffins into the loaves of cornbread you see before you today. I encourage you to toast the cornmeal with aromatic warm chilies and freshly ground black pepper, slowly brown the butter into nutty liquid gold, and fold in fresh corn kernels and rich whole buttermilk. Brush the loaves, fresh from the oven, with salted honey butter and then settle deep into the sofa with a warm buttered slice, a steaming mug of joe, and a worn paperback copy of “Last of the Mohicans.” In that moment, I absorb my father’s smile.
Cornbread for Fred
Two loaves of cornbread
2 cups of medium grind cornmeal (I prefer Bob’s Red Mill)
1 tsp chili powder
½ tsp freshly ground black pepper
16 Tbsp (2 sticks) unsalted butter
1 ½ cup all-purpose flour
1 Tbsp baking powder
½ tsp baking soda
4 tsp fine sea salt
2 Tbsp granulated sugar
2 Tbsp dark brown sugar
1/2 tsp freshly grated nutmeg
1 cup buttermilk
½ cup of your best maple syrup
4 large eggs, room temperature
3 cups fresh corn kernels (or frozen, slightly thawed)
Honey butter:
4 Tbsp unsalted butter
1 Tbsp honey
Pinch of fine sea salt
1) Preheat your oven to 350 degrees.
2) Prep two loaf pans with either butter or cooking spray and line with parchment paper.
3) In a cast iron skillet on medium heat, toast the cornmeal with the chili powder and black pepper until aromatic and slightly browned. Pour into a large bowl to cool.
4) In a medium sauté pan, brown the unsalted butter until it stops sizzling and smells rather nutty. Pour the browned butter, and all the toasted solids, into a glass measuring cup to stop the cooking and cool.
5) Add the flour, baking powder and soda, both sugars and the freshly grated nutmeg to the cooled cornmeal. Whisk to combine.
6) In another bowl, whisk together the buttermilk, maple syrup and eggs. Pour into the dry mix and fold together with a spatula just until no dry streaks remain. Fold in the corn. Evenly portion the batter between the two pans and bake for 40-45 minutes until the top is dry and slightly firm to the touch.
7) While the breads are baking, melt together the butter and honey in a small saucepan. Remove from the heat and whisk in the sea salt.
8) Once the two cornbreads have cooled for five minutes, brush the tops of the loaves with the honey butter and then let the loaves cool to room temperature in the pans.
