Cornbread

The sweetness of the honey and the spiciness of the jalapeños make for an intriguing flavor combination in this rich corn bread. Wear rubber or plastic gloves when handling and chopping hot chile peppers—the chiles can make your fingers sting—and wash your hands thoroughly afterward. Serve with butter, honey butter, Maple Butter (page 274), or jam.

One of my favorite possessions is my grandmother’s cast-iron skillet. It’s more precious to me than the antique bone china that I also inherited. To think of all the fried chicken and cornbread it has held is amazing. Several years ago, I returned home to Georgia after living in New York City, and I carried my treasured skillet in a blanket on my lap practically the whole trip. It is almost like my sacred talisman. No one will dare touch it when we are cleaning up from dinner. If I leave the room, I return to a spotless kitchen with a dirty cast-iron skillet on the stovetop. No one wants the responsibility. It sounds severe, but a little fear is fine with me. When properly seasoned over time, cast iron develops a virtually nonstick surface that only improves with use. To clean cast-iron cookware, wash with a nonabrasive sponge and warm soapy water. Rinse it well. To prevent rust, make sure the piece is completely dry before you store it. As insurance, I usually place mine in a warm oven for a little while to fully dry out. Cast iron is great for baking cornbread, pan-frying, and sauteing. It is a little slow to heat up, but once it does, it heats evenly and stays hotter longer. Cast iron is inexpensive and can be found at hardware and cookware stores.

I could make a meal out of just buttered cornbread. Except perhaps for barbecue, cornbread is as close to religion in the South as any particular food gets. At the top of the list of cornbread sins is adding sugar. You will notice a complete lack of sugar in this cornbread recipe. Sugar is more often found in what is referred to derisively as “Yankee cornbread.” Adherents of white versus yellow cornmeal are like Methodists and Baptists: some think you’re going to hell if you follow one path and not the other. I am of the white cornmeal sect. The theory is that white corn was less hybridized and closer to the original grain than yellow. Plain white cornmeal can be surprisingly tricky to find, even in Atlanta; most of what lines the grocery store shelves is a mix or self-rising, which already contains the leavener that makes the cornmeal rise. Although yellow and white cornmeal are interchangeable, plain and self-rising cornmeal are not. Warming the skillet and bacon grease or butter in the oven prepares the skillet for baking and melts the fat. Most often, I use butter. I like to let it get just barely nutty brown on the edges. The brown flecks give the cornbread extra color and flavor.

My mom calls this chili, but my dad insists it’s Mexican spaghetti. I don’t care what they call it; anything that’s super simple, delicious, and makes a lot is a winner in my book. As an added bonus, the ingredients are cheap and it can be made up to a day ahead and reheated. The green chile cornbread goes perfectly with the chili, but if you prefer you can leave out the chiles or heat it up with a finely diced jalapeño.

When we were on a family vacation in New Orleans we came across a store in the French Quarter that had daily cooking classes. We decided to sign up for a class (it got us out of going to another museum with our dad), and it turned out to be a blast. We learned to make several different Cajun dishes, but this was my favorite. I love the beans, but we also learned the secret to making the best cornbread ever—add lots of milk and sprinkle sugar on the top.

Soaking the cornmeal in buttermilk is a tip I picked up from my good friend Peter Reinhart’s epic tome, The Bread Baker’s Apprentice. The wonderful flavor it imparts and the texture it lends might keep you from ever considering using another boxed cornbread mix.

Cornbread is one of those foods people get mighty opinionated about, as in “Nobody makes cornbread as good as my (momma, grammy, Uncle Phoebus, just fill in the blank).” Not only that, but once someone gets a beloved piece of that cornbread in their hands, well, as one writer said, “If you try to take my cornbread, there will be consequences and repercussions.” I think of cornbread a bit like barbecue: Just about every region of the country has its variation, which, as if ordained from above, is simply the best. Cornbread, cornpone, jonnycakes, hush puppies—the names and approaches differ, but not the devotion. My version is California-style, as in how do we keep all of that awesome taste while using healthier ingredients? Using some spelt flour helps, as does using just a bit of organic maple syrup as a sweetener and extra-virgin olive oil in place of butter. The lemon zest allowed me to put the word “beyond” into the title of this recipe. If you’ll allow me to play yenta, I’d match the cornbread with the Rockin’ Black Bean Soup (page 71). They’re a very happy couple.

My grandmother and mother very often made cornbread sticks along with our summer suppers when I was a child. I grew up on Cape Cod, and we ate a lot of fresh fish back in those days. Cod, haddock, flounder, and bluefish were all staples at our summer table. Cornbread is eaten alongside fish to help push down any bones you might accidentally swallow. Due to food allergies, and tragically polluted and overfished waters, we’ve stopped eating the fish. But the cornbread sticks have remained. My mother still bakes them up every year when we go back East for our annual summer reunions, and I make them for my kids, who love them just as much as I always have. I make them with my Basic Gluten-Free Flour Mix, but you may also use Gluten-Free Bread Flour Mix (page 158) for a more intense flavor and a slightly more crumbly texture.

This moist cornbread is an ideal companion to bean soups and chilis.

Not too sweet and just moist enough—this corn bread goes with anything! Try it with Spicy Oven-Baked Pepper Shrimp (page 69) and All-Day Beef Chili (page 122).

Cornbread is the Southern starch; it’s been in the South as long as there have been cooks to make it. Some people I know still call it corn pone. I always cook it in a well-seasoned cast-iron skillet and add my secret ingredient: cracklin’s. These are fried pieces of pork skin, and they are incredibly delicious; they’re the by-product of rendering pig skin for fat, and because I cook a lot of whole hogs I have the makings for them around all the time. If you don’t, feel free to substitute some nice crispy bacon instead. You might also add some chopped red bell pepper for a change and some color.

Sandy doesn’t even like cornbread, and yet this is one of her favorite dishes. If you weren’t one before, we’ll make a cornbread lover out of you, too. This dish is extremely easy to make and works great when paired with our CQ’s Royal Cottage Pie (page 38) or our Shrimply Delicious Shrimp and Grits (page 54). It also can stand proud all on its own, making a great appetizer or a replacement for the rolls in your bread basket!

In Texas it is a given that everybody needs a good recipe for corn bread, and here is mine. I like it warm from the oven slathered in butter. It’s also good served with Chili con Carne (page 110).

Embellishing a recipe as iconic as corn bread could be a disaster of New Coke magnitude, so when a friend suggested dolling up the recipe with jalapeños and cheddar cheese, I proceeded with caution. I have issues with vegan cheese—it’s often overprocessed, packed with preservatives, and usually gross—but Emily, my office Queen Bee and resident persnickety vegan, suggested Follow Your Heart’s cheddar and made me a convert. I found nary a gluten globule or preservative in sight, and it melted! My mind adequately blown, I got to work in the kitchen, and a new bakery regular emerged. The cheese has the perfect creamy texture to complement the corn bread’s slightly grainy quality, and its sweetness is offset by the heat of the jalapeños. Bring this along to your next barbecue, but be sure to make extra: Those non-vegan eat-everything sorts tend to devour an unfair share.

Some recipes at the bakery were brought forth by inspiration, others by customer demand. The lobbying for corn bread began the very first day of business, with a customer spying an unfrosted vanilla cupcake and ordering “one of those corn muffins.” Rather than fight the will of the people, I dived right into development mode, and after a year of sorry results, finally perfected the recipe. I hope you’ll agree it was well worth the effort.

Pat: A cast iron skillet is, far and away, the best pan for cooking this cornbread. In fact, we don’t prepare it in anything else. Preheating the skillet in the oven creates a crispy golden crust, and it really seems to help the batter pop up and rise beautifully during the baking process. We serve the warm cornbread straight from the skillet with a big ole wooden spoon.

This is my cornbread, the one I offer up as what real cornbread ought to be: skillet-born, sugar-free, and bacon-blessed. Heating the bacon drippings in a cast-iron skillet is important. When the batter hits the hot fat, it sizzles and starts forming a deeply browned, crispy bottom crust that tastes like a good hushpuppy. Some people omit flour from their cornbread, but I find that it helps hold the cornbread together when it's cut, particularly when I use coarse stone-ground cornmeal. My sweet daddy and I grind our own cornmeal on a 1923 Meadows Mill that my great-grandfather, Papa Will Reece, bought new. The mill is considered portable, but it weighs several hundred pounds and must be hauled on a stout trailer. It's powered by a hit-or-miss engine, one of the first machines used in farming. Daddy hauls the mill and engine to heritage festivals and such all over the country. The whole operation is really something to see. For your cornbread, seek out the best whole-grain stone-ground cornmeal available in your community or order it from ansonmills.com. Fresh whole-grain meal is quite perishable, so store it in an airtight container in the refrigerator or freezer.

This zucchini-flecked cornbread walks a delicious line between sweet and savory.