Cornbread
Top, still in its skillet, right after it came out of the oven. This style of cracking on the top is desired for a more old school form of cornbread. This looked really weird to me for years, and it didn’t stop being that way in my mind until I started thinking of this style of cornbread as massive corn gems. I make my gems in an authentic, 1867 R&E #2 pan, because I’m that kind of food history and cookery nerd. Then it looked normal to see the cracks.
I live with a man that has definitive ideas on what is corn bread and what is corn cake. I assume it’s because he’s a Texan-Southerner who spends considerable amounts of time missing his northern Louisiana Granny’s (of blessed memory) foods, but either way, it’s given me a lot of opportunities over the last decade to explore the various options when making historical cornbreads! It took a long time before I figured out how he wanted it, and only because I finally sat him down and interrogated him on what hers was like. This is a thing I do for people sometimes, where I interrogate them in order to figure out how to make their beloved family food no one wrote a recipe for. Once he told me, I got it pretty fast, thanks to my deep interests in pioneer and Depression-era cookery (this style floats the two).
If you’ve never had dense, crumbly, not sweet cornbread, this is going to be a whole different thing for you. Just know that up front, because it bears exactly no similarity to what you’re getting from the Jiffy box. NONE. It tastes like the essence of corn, which is oddly unusual in contemporary cornbreads. Also know that I really did split the difference here on what would be closer to “cornbread” to most Americans and what would be cornbread to him for this specific version of my cornbread. Before Ross, I made corncake like everyone else does, and these are legitimately different final products.
If you are missing your Granny’s, MiMi/MeMe’s, or Nana’s 1930s, farm-style cornbread, this will get you pretty close. Or even all the way there, depending on the farm in question. Remove the wheat flour entirely or drop it down to 1-2 tablespoons to hit that truly authentic Southern sweet spot. This really does have more flour than I’d usually include in cornbreads he’ll be eating, so as to make the recipe a bit more inclusive.
I’m from California (not far from where Sabrina lives, actually), and occasionally I exploit that fact to cover up intentionally deSouthernized formulas I serve to him, since my experience tells me that Texans and Southerners (Texans seem to struggle to decide if they’re Texan Southerners or just Texans) will excuse these kinds of mild offenses based on it not being your fault you didn’t get to be born in the South. Texans like Ross have an extra element of this, adapted to their Texas National Pride. This also gets me off the hook on teaching Child Tester the nuances of Texas history, as he has no reasonable expectation I would know any of it. Most of the time I really don’t know as much about it as he does, so it works really well.
He totally noticed the increased wheat in his mouth, and said ever-so-sweetly to me, “this is good cornbread, Allie, but it has more flour than usual. Was that on purpose?” He’s not gonna directly critique the cornbread, though, since it still ticked all the boxes, and he definitely scarfed down his cornbread and chili, but he would’ve liked it denser. Some of you may feel similarly, and if so, cut the wheat flour. I told him it was on purpose, since his cornbread really might not be tasty to people who didn’t grow up with it, and his expression generously indicated he’d thought that might be the case. The amount of this loaf of cornbread he ate tells me he doesn’t fault y’all for not being from down here, either. He’s lived with an immigrant too long to be used to these sorts of shenanigans, I suppose?
Crumb shot! As you can see, this is a crumbly cornbread. To us. To him, this looks suspiciously like it’s entered the cake zone (even though it hadn’t).
Know that I made this “the way I bake,” minus the disasters element. I used measuring cups to keep the quantities for you, because I don’t normally measure stuff when I make this and I expect that the “eyeball measurements” trait isn’t particularly helpful here for most of you. You are really just trying to maintain the general ratios and use this recipe as a method (including adjusting what you’d like to, as you see fit), rather than needing to view this as a set recipe you should follow line-by-line.
This also seemed good to post today, since Thanksgiving is tomorrow. This is a much closer version of cornbread to what you’d have seen way back when than what most people make today. If you didn’t know (because y’all know I love history), no Thanksgivings were officially celebrated after the original Pilgrim/Indigenous one until 1863. In response to the tremendous success at Gettysburg, Lincoln declared that the 4th Thursday of November, from 1863 forward, would be a day of gratitude in the form of Thanksgiving. This held until 1941, during which time FDR sought to stimulate the economy (remember, the Depression was underway, albeit nearing its end, and ditto the War Effort very much being underway) by providing more days between Thanksgiving and Christmas for shopping. He got Congress to switch the date to the 3rd Thursday of November, and it’s been that way ever since. The insanity of Black Friday validates that FDR had a viable plan for getting citizens to spend their monies to push businesses into the black each year. There’s your Thanksgiving history for today!
For increased authenticity for the OG Thanksgiving and what was going on during the Lincoln period, remove all (or at last most) of the wheat flour, the sugar (can include if going for Lincoln period), baking soda, and probably the salt. If you’re looking for a post-FDR cornbread, it’s up to you if you keep the wheat, though I’d probably still pull the sugar since war rationing didn’t end until June 1947. Between the end of the war in 1945 and the formal, legal end of rationing in 1947, sugar really was the only product still under rationing. I’d say that based on that, if you want to give up a bit of your sugar ration as part of your invocation of gratitude, that’s also okay.
Lastly, adjust this to fit your kitchen situation. What I love the most about this style of cooking is that it really is designed to work with what you’ve got on hand and to accommodate as many adjustments as are needed for your situation.
The bottom. Ross felt it was important for y’all to see how the bottom looks. I was nålbinding on my bed when he brought it to me to photograph, because I really thought I was done taking pictures until dinner time. This was made more convenient for him by the fact that the lighting in my room is incredibly poor, so I already had the photography lights out in order to see my stitches more easily. For those of you who are interested in examples of nålbinding, I am posting those instead of plants in our Instagram now for the Ask Allie columns. I also have more examples on my personal IG, which is where I document my NB journey. Many of these pieces will wind up in the company IG, because my garden is a freaking mess right now and I just can’t bear to show it to y’all.
Here’s what you’ll need
2 cups corn meal
1/2 cup all-purpose flour (optional; you can scale this down as much as you want)
1 teaspoon baking soda (optional)
1/2 tablespoon each: sugar, salt (optional)
1 1/4 cups water (you can sub in yogurt or milk or beer or whatever, but it will soften the cornbread’s crumb if you do)
1 tablespoon-ish of lard or other fat/oil (I used “one finger” of bacon grease for this, which is equivalent to a tablespoon, for people who prefer to bake “the old way”)
It mattered a lot to Child Tester that I take a picture of her heavily cheese-laden chili. There’s cornbread in there, even if you can’t see it on account of the cheese.
Here’s what you’ll do (and bake time!)
Turn your oven onto 425F/220C/GM7, and put an 8” cast iron pan with the lard in there during preheating. If you are doing this with a cake pan, ditto. That lard needs to be melted before you put anything in the pan, and the pan should be hot to get it that good crust.
Mix together all of your dry ingredients. I do this with my hand, but you can use a spoon or spatula. Add the water and mix in. I did this part with a spatula, but I often just use my hand instead on the days I’d rather rinse a hand than wash an extra dish. Either way, this will more closely resemble corn mush/mash than batter. If this makes you uncomfortable, you’re welcome to thin it down more. Just know it needs to bake longer if you do.
When the oven is hot, open the oven door, pull out the rack, put the corn mixture in, then smooth out the top some. It doesn’t need to be perfect; this is a rustic food. Push the rack back in the oven, quickly slam the oven door shut (or not, if you’ve got more sense than me and realize in the moment that you’re preserving exactly none of the oven heat by doing this), and bake for 25-30 minutes. It should look like it does in the top photo, with cracks and all the jazz. When you do remove it from the pan, it should look like the bottom photo.
Let it sit in the pan and cool. Do not take it out of the pan until it’s at least mostly cooled. Ideally you will let it cool completely before you cut it, but real talk is that we all know that isn’t how it’s gonna go down. You do you.
I do not put my cornbread in my chili. I instead put butter on it. I don’t know why I always put my cornbread on a napkin, but that’s what I do.
