The great big search for a great cornbread recipe
- Scott Daniels: We Ate Well and Cheaply
- October 29, 2021
- 902
A few years ago, I talked about the big search for a great recipe for northern or sweet cornbread. I offered a recipe that was in the category of Good Enough I Guess, but now I’ve found the perfect thing, and I want to share it with you right away.
I have to confess that after I wrote before about cornbread and my difficult search for the sweet recipe my mother used when I was a child, my brother in Alabama called my sister and said, “Do you want to tell him she got it off the Quaker cornmeal box or should I?”
Cornbread in the south is an altogether different affair, being not at all sweet and more bread like. It’s ironic, given the southern proclivity for dumping the whole sugar bowl into their glass of iced tea, that they would prefer a rather bland, savory version of cornbread.
Cornbread itself has very deep roots on the North American continent, with native peoples having pounded dried corn into meal for thousands of years before a single White person set a deadly smallpox foot on dry land here. Settlers learned to use corn and cornmeal from Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek and Cherokee tribes, and it became what is now called a cornerstone of southern cooking. Hopi people in what is now the southeastern part of the United States also used dried corn as a staple food. Corn was plentiful, easily grown, could be made into anything from salads to breads to booze, and it held a rightful place at center stage for Native American peoples.
By the time of the American Civil War, soldiers became dependent on cornmeal as a staple of their diet, leavening it into bread when they could find something to do so or making hoecakes when they couldn’t, the latter being an unleavened flatbread common for centuries along the eastern seaboard from New England to the Caribbean. Remember the Johnnycake we all made around Thanksgiving in grade school to learn about pilgrims? That stuff.
For those held as slaves in the American South, it was a cheap and quick filler food that could be prepared in a variety of ways. One has to imagine the cornmeal available to those poor folks must have been course, tooth breaking and full of sand. Maybe the tradition of savory cornbread in the south came about due to a long lack of sugar among many of those who subsisted on it. Then again, there’s that iced-tea thing, which argues against such a supposition.
Here in the states where autumn brings color and we know how to drive in snow, cornbread tends to be denser and sweeter, more like a cake than bread. It’s delicious with ham and bean soup, or just about any kind of soup for that matter, and seems especially fitting with hearty cool-weather dishes.
This recipe makes use of both yellow and white cornmeal, is sweetened three ways, and I’ve even made it with almond milk rather than real dairy without any harmful effect. It is quite sweet and is as good alongside soup as it is broken up with cold milk poured over for breakfast.
SWEET NORTHERN CORNBREAD
1/4 cup white cornmeal
1/4 cup yellow cornmeal, medium grind
1 1/2 cups unbleached flour
1/3 cup white sugar
1/3 cup brown sugar
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1/3 cup vegetable oil
3 tablespoons melted butter
1 tablespoon honey
2 extra large eggs, beaten
1 1/4 cups whole milk
Preheat oven to 350 F.
Sift together the two cornmeals, flour, the sugars, baking powder and salt.
Whisk together the oil, melted butter, honey and milk and add the eggs. Get the wet ingredients well combined, then add to the dry ingredients. Mix just until well combined and pour into a round, greased cake pan. Bake 35 minutes, until the edges are just barely beginning to pull away from the pan. Serve warm with butter.