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Southern Recipes - Southern Cooking"down home Southern Food" |
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One Southerner's Perspective on CornbreadIt does not bother me how you make your cornbread. Make it the way you like it. But it does bother me when I see recipes on the web labeled as "Southern" when no Southerner would even recognize it as cornbread. It saddens me that many people use these recipes and think they are cooking Southern cornbread, when they are not. If you like that kind of cornbread, fine! Just don't call it Southern Cornbread! Some Perspective: My views on cornbread were developed from being born and raised in the Deep South. I consider the deep South as being Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Tennessee. I am not referring to geography. I am talking about cooking style. Florida, Texas and the Carolinas share many dishes with the Deep South States, but they are made entirely different. The point of all this is to explain why I say most (all?) Southern cornbread recipes on the web which are labeled as Southern, are not Southern from my perspective. Pet Peeve #1: How do you spell it? I don't know what Webster says, but it's cornbread NOT corn bread. Most Southerners spell cornbread as one word, not two. Pet Peeve #2: Sugar in Cornbread: Southern cornbread is NOT SWEET! It does NOT contain sugar. Southern cornbread is bread to accompany a meal. It is not dessert. It is not cake. If you like sweet cornbread, go ahead and put sugar in it, but don't call it Southern cornbread. Pet Peeve #3: Recipes that use equal parts of corn meal and flour: The flour is in cornbread just to hold it together and give it body. Cornbread should be crumbly. Too much flour makes it cake-like in texture and detracts from the corn meal flavor. A good mixture is about 1/3 cup flour to 1 cup corn meal. Pet Peeve #4: Yellow corn meal vs. white corn meal: Yellow corn meal is fine for tamale pie but not in cornbread. I don't know the difference, other than color, but white corn meal seems to have a better texture. Besides, yellow cornbread looks funny. (Again, it looks like cake, rather than bread). Nearly all recipes on the web call for yellow corn meal and I don't know a single Southern cook that uses it in cornbread. Pet Peeve #5: Cornbread shape...muffins, uggggh! Southern cornbread should be cooked only two ways. Round or pawns, both cooked in cast iron. Round: The round shape, of course, comes from the shape of a regular cast iron frying pan. This is the most common way to cook cornbread. Pawns: Pawns are also called corn sticks or corncob cornbread. They are made using a cast iron pan that shapes the batter into sticks resembling corncobs. No Southerner makes cornbread in a "muffin" shape. That's "restaurant cornbread". *****
I could think of a couple more pet peeves, but since I've probably already offended some Southerners and all Texans, guess I'll stop here. If you happen to be one of the offended, hey, it's all in fun. It's just cornbread! Ken, C.O.G. (Crabby Old Guy) Webmasters: Want to copy our recipes to your website? Read this first. |
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