When Chocolate Bread Pudding Tastes Like Home

By Heather Lynn Wright

November 15, 2022

Photo caption: Heather (far left) and her twin sister Nicole (far right) visiting Nannie (center) at her Southern Pines home in the mid-1990s. Chocolate bread pudding not pictured.

The idea of home has been heavy on my heart this semester. I’m currently working on a place-based grant within my college-level English courses where we’re studying the idea of home. I—a rural identifying person—am living and teaching in a rural community that is not my original home. There’s a greenway, but it isn’t my greenway. There are mountains, but they aren’t my mountains. There’s far more than my comfortable one stoplight and the barbecue sauce isn’t always vinegar based. 

In 2019’s Appalachian Reckoning (edited by McCarroll and Harkins), there is a haunting piece by Jim Minick, “How to Make Cornbread, or Thoughts on Being an Appalachian From Pennsylvania Who Calls Virginia Home But Now Lives in Georgia.” Minick begins with “Step 1: Home” and proceeds to give a working definition of home.

Home, verb. To find the place, as in homing pigeon; not “Let’s go home” but “Let’s home”; the journey, however long it takes.

Home, noun. The destination; the place where I’m born, again and again, every morning; where I break the fast of darkness with a glass of water drawn from this one well; where I plant and am planted; where I nourish and am nourished; where—despite ticks and bears and isolation—I want to live and die; where – somehow – I come closest to feeling I belong. (p. 356). 

As a former professor of mine would say: That’ll preach. 

How do we define home?  Is it where we’re born? Or is it where we choose to be rooted and planted? Is it where we thrive (or survive)? 

When I think about home, I think of my classroom. I’m a nester. I need to feel safe and literally at home in the area that I spend the majority of my time. My classroom feels like home and more than anything, I want my students to feel safe in that space as well. I think of my wonderful students. I teach two classes of seniors. Senior year is such an exciting—yet impossibly scary—time! There are so many choices—but so many decisions to be made. There are countless opportunities—but countless chances for plans to be derailed by decision letters that don’t begin (or end) with what we wanted in our dreams. For seniors, the fall semester is spent applying to schools. We perfect college essays and letters of interest. We fill out all the mandatory paperwork and forms. We patiently wait for decision day to come in. I encourage my students to share their good news. We celebrate and I scream and clap/flail my arms in excitement. 

For many students, what lays heavy on their minds (especially being in a small rural community) is whether “to stay” or whether “to go” the following year. The way my students describe home is such an interesting look into their experience of place (or what I perceive to be their experience). Some can’t wait to get out of town and to explore bigger cities in bigger states. Others want to pursue opportunities in their hometown and are excited about their next move. I tell them all the time: You will be where you’re supposed to be. If that’s what your heart wants, you are perfect with where you want to plant yourself in this time and in your chosen place. 

Minick has a running image of cornbread throughout his piece—this running symbol of cornbread as home, as welcoming, of safety. I told my students about chocolate bread pudding and how it tastes like love and home to me. Growing up, once a month or so, my mom would pack up my twin sister and I into the minivan and we’d go see my great-grandmother, Nannie, across the state. Nannie, regardless of what time we’d arrive, would always have homemade spaghetti (never from a can) and freshly made chocolate bread pudding. Nannie was the only one who would ever make me my favorite dessert—it’s made over a double boiler and my grandmother always asserts that it’s far too tedious of a dish. Chocolate bread pudding always tastes like home to me because of the reminder of Nannie and the feeling of being so loved and special. 

I asked my students to write recipes of their home. They could start out with a recipe that reminded them of home or they could think of the elements of their place (the mountains, the football field, their friend’s house, etc.). The results were beautiful and it was such a wonderful insight into the narratives of my students, the things that mattered to them, and the things that crafted their home. 

I truly believe that being a teacher is the greatest occupation in all the world. As teachers, we have the honor and the privilege to do life with students. If home is a journey—where we choose to plant ourselves or be rooted from some spell of time—we are one stop on the path of our students. However, if we are seeking the narratives and stories of our students—if we are honoring their identities and experiences in the classroom—hopefully we are helping to prepare them for that next step, regardless of where it might be. Sometimes it’s students that help point the way to home (even a different home than the one we may have envisioned for ourselves). 

Heather Lynn Wright, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of English education at Gardner-Webb University. This blog post was written last year, when she taught English at a rural North Carolina high school.