That Perpetual Corn Bread Argument!

I was raised on cornbread and I still love it today as do most other natives of Appalachia. My wife, as I mentioned in my previous post about Shucked Beans, was raised in Wisconsin about halfway between Milwaukee and Green Bay and had never seen many historical Appalachian foods including Shucked Beans, pinto beans, squirrels, hog jaw, banana pudding, and cornbread.  After living 28 years in Appalachia, she loves them all and we eat them often at our house.  

Corn Bread, Photo by Depositphotos

When it comes to cornbread, we start with a small, cast iron skillet and a little olive oil, since we do not eat lard.  We grease the skillet and heat it on a stove top burner as the batter is being mixed.  We use one whole egg, a bit of baking powder, about half and half all purpose flour and cornmeal made from Appalachian Heritage corn and pour the batter in the skillet on the stove top.  When the batter hits the skillet, I like to hear that good sizzle you get from a hot skillet which helps give the bottom crust a good crisp, crunchy bite.  When most of the bubbles on the top of the batter have burst, we put the skillet in the oven at 350% for about 25 minutes.  At the end of that time, we switch the oven from bake to broil, move the rack just under the broiler burner, and watch it closely until it has that good, brown crust about the color of the hide of a "yaller" to ordinary brown dog.  

I like mine with a healthy chunk of butter placed in the middle of the portion.  My wife does not like the butter.  We have it often with homemade soups, pinto beans, shucked beans, and other more clearly Appalachian meals.  But we do not eat it with every meal.  But my wife often mentions a woman with whom she worked for several years who said that when she was growing up her father had to have pinto beans and cornbread on the table at every meal including breakfast.  That is a bit too much for me.  We also will sometimes have hoecakes for breakfast.  For those, we use our regular cornbread recipe but pour the batter in the hot skillet in same manner as you would use to make pancakes.  Cornbread hoecakes will never cook as thinly as wheat pancakes but we both love them with butter and maple syrup, or sometimes sorghum.  I also like to save my last hoecake to eat with a heavy slathering of apple butter.  Hoecakes are called that because they were often eaten for breakfast in homes where there was little food and if you ate two or three or four hoecakes for breakfast you could go to the fields and keep an old fashioned goose neck or "laid" hoe singing at least until lunch time.  Often, in some of those fields, leftover hoecakes were also what they had for lunch.  I also love corn bread and milk as a late night snack just before bed time.  But for an even more interesting snack, or nearly a complete meal try taking a bowl or large glass and dice up a good strong onion, mix the onion and cornbread in the container and pour ice cold buttermilk over it.  Since buttermilk is much thicker than sweet milk, as we called it in Eastern Kentucky, and you need to give it a little time to soak into the bread before you add a bit more buttermilk.  It is an awesome snack and I also like to sprinkle mine with black pepper. 

Throughout this blog post, I have not yet mentioned the "perpetual corn bread argument" which I mentioned in the title.  I am certain that nearly all devoted corn bread eaters already know what the argument is about.  You hear it all over the country wherever anybody cooks and eats corn bread.  Do you or do you not put sugar in your cornbread?  We do not and, Thank God, I was not raised that way.  To me putting sugar in cornbread is a lot asking a native of Milwaukee to refrain from putting a pat of butter on a hamburger.  It is sacrilege to put sugar in cornbread no matter what you think, Dear Reader!  My perpetual response to the perpetual corn bread argument is this:  "If you want to bake a bake a cake, bake a cake.  But don't put sugar in it and try to call it corn bread!"