Wait a cotton-picking minute

[mme_hardy]

Melissa Clark's New York Times recipe for skillet cornbread.  (Complete with ghastly perky video, if you can stand it)

Ingredients:

12 tablespoons (1 1/2 sticks) unsalted butter

½ cup maple syrup

2 ¼ cups buttermilk

3 large eggs

1 ½ cups yellow cornmeal, fine or medium-coarse grind

½ cup whole wheat flour

½ cup all-purpose flour

1 ½ tablespoons baking powder

1 ½ teaspoons kosher salt

½ teaspoon baking soda
 

Selected quotes:

• Some cornbread falls on the light and fluffy side of the spectrum, sweet enough to pass for dessert. Then there is crisp, lean and salty cornbread, nearly as savory as the fried chicken that often goes with it. This recipe splits the difference.
• Crisp-edged, maple-syrup-spiked and tender-crumbed, a buttered slice works equally well with a drizzle of honey or with hot sauce, or both if you just can’t decide.
• Pay attention to the scent wafting around the kitchen. When it smells like chestnuts roasting on a street corner in December, immediately pour the butter into a bowl to stop the cooking.

If you watch the video -- and I recommend being up-to-date on your insulin first -- you'll discover that Clark chooses both the cornmeal grind and the whole-wheat flour because they add sweetness.

Bless your heart, honey, if you want a cake, make a cake. 

Comments

[movingfinger]

1. God, that's twee.

2. Whole wheat flour is not sweet. It has a bitter edge to it. This is why we all got so excited about KA Flour's "white whole wheat."

2a. There is a lot of difference between fine and medium-coarse. What she means is "anything but polenta."

3. I would lay dollars to doughnuts that there's an older version of this somewhere in which corn syrup is used rather than maple syrup.

4. God, that's twee.

[mme_hardy]

Did you watch the video? It will exceed your maximum daily allowance of twee.

[adrian_turtle]

There was a moment when I thought she was using the definition of "sweet" that seems to be taught in preschools these days. When a 3-year-old starts using "sweet" to mean "tastes good," it's just annoying, and it's usually possible to get them back to using the other meaning in a few months. But I expect more from a professional adult food writer. After the thought crossed my mind the first time, I realized she does it all the time. She browns butter to make it taste a little better, she uses whole wheat flour to make it taste a little better, she uses a different grind of corn to make it taste a little better. Sure, no problem. I just wish she could find another word for "tastes better." Maybe even several different words, for the different kinds of taste?

In other news, wow is that ever a lot of butter. The butter:grain ratio is almost as high as for shortbread, though of course shortbread has no egg or buttermilk (in my experience. Who knows what the New York Times would make of it?)

[mme_hardy]

To my tongue, brown butter *is* sweeter because of the caramelization of the solids.

[tigerflower]

That is definitely cake.

Southern cornbread ain't sweet *or* yellow. Northern cornbread's yellow and sweet but it ain't that sweet and sweet and fancy Jesus, it has not got that much damn BUTTER in it. Or whole wheat flour. What is she smoking? I mean clearly, the munchies got the better of her here.

[mme_hardy]

Both my mom and dad (Texas) and my mother-in-law (Georgia) use yellow corn meal; I think it must be really, really regional which you pick.

[tigerflower]

Huh! I have been lectured by a few Atlantans about how proper Southern cornbread isn't yellow -- so maybe it is an Atlanta thing, actually, and not so much Southern writ large.

[mme_hardy]

My husband may correct me when he gets home, but I don't think my mother-in-law even kept white cornmeal in the house.

[mme_hardy]

I checked, and my m-i-l is from Alabama, so it's possible. But her Georgian husband never let out a peep about the inauthenticity of her excellent cornbread. Edit: And her Georgian husband's Atlanta-born mother always used yellow cornmeal.

Husband: "Maybe the waxed-mustache crowd is snooty about white corn meal, I wouldn't know."

[minim_calibre]

In-laws (SE Texas) use yellow.

[mme_hardy]

Clearly white is some sort of fancy-pants Yankee thing.

[rinue]

I'm Texan and use yellow cornmeal. Of course, Texas is not consistent about whether Texas should be considered part of the South. My husband argues that anything east of the Balcones Escarpment is South (Dallas, etc) and anything west of the Balcones Escarpment is Southwest (El Paso, etc), because that's where the soil type shifts and you wind up with totally different agriculture. My own family is more of the mindset that Texas is Texas and not comparable to anything outside of Texas.

My cornbread is definitely not sweet, though. Not at all. Corn fritters can be sweet and I don't mind, but when I bite into sweet cornbread expecting something else, I am terribly deflated. I don't do sweet tea either. These things strike me (probably unfairly) as uncowboy.

[mme_hardy]

My mom grew up in Abilene (and was born in Moran), where there's nearly no agriculture at all; it's all oil.

[caulkhead]

Is baking powder AND baking soda a usual thing, or is that another peculiarity of this recipe? (Also, I am curious to see what her version of 'sweet' cornbread looks like.)

[mme_hardy]

It's reasonably common, although I couldn't tell you what the reasoning is behind it. Some recipes for desserts do, some don't.

[ellen_fremedon]

I think the reasoning is that the baking soda cancels the acidity of the buttermilk, so that the baking powder has a ph-neutral dough to work on. Same reason dutched cocoa-flavored cakes can be leavened with baking powder alone, but natural cocoa needs baking powder.

[mme_hardy]

Thank you! I've never known.

[ellen_fremedon]

And of course that comment should say 'natural cocoa needs baking soda.'

[perennialanna]

Dutched cocoa is one of those things that sends British cooks to Google in a panic - we get cocoa powder, unspecified. Some brands are noticeably more chocolatey, but that's mostly about price. (Double action baking powder is another occasion to google, over here baking powder is baking powder is baking powder).

[adrian_turtle]

Baking soda reacts with an acid ingredient (in this recipe it's buttermilk; in muffins it's often juice or fruit puree) to make bubbles and leaven the dough. If you wait too long, or stir too much, between "baking soda touches buttermilk" and "dough cooks," the bubbles will deflate.

Baking powder makes bubbles in the heat of the oven. So if you forgot to preheat your oven and had to let the dough sit around after mixing? The baking-soda bubbles would be gone, but you'd still get some leavening from the baking-powder bubbles. It's a useful backup for that kind of thing going wrong. And if everything goes right, then you have both kinds of bubbles leavening the cake. You end up with a different texture if you blow bubbles in a liquid and make the bubbly liquid stiffen up, than if you blow bubbles in goo that is already partly-solidified.

[mme_hardy]

Thank you! I was a bit confused because IIRC double-acting baking powder is a mix of baking soda and something else. Or maybe that's just the out-of-baking-powder substitution (baking soda + cream of tartar + salt).

[caulkhead]

I always thought baking powder + cream of tartar *was* baking powder, it just saved the mixing. Fascinating.

[mme_hardy]

According to Wiki, it depends on the manufacturer. (I'm fascinated to find out about Rumford.)

Common low-temperature acid salts include cream of tartar and monocalcium phosphate (also called calcium acid phosphate). High-temperature acid salts include sodium aluminium sulfate, sodium aluminum phosphate, and sodium acid pyrophosphate.[9]
Rumford Baking Powder is a double acting consumer product that contains only monocalcium phosphate as a leavening acid. With this acid, about two-thirds of the available gas is released within about two minutes of mixing at room temperature. It then becomes dormant because an intermediate form of dicalcium phosphate is generated during the initial mixing. Further release of gas requires the batter to be heated above 140 degrees F.[10]

[vom_marlowe]

Nothing wrong with yellow cornmeal, but what the devil is all that sugar doing in there? And the butter's for the skillet, not to fatten up the dough. What in the world--how can you eat that cake with chili? Or fried chicken?

Tell her to make some nice puffy cornmeal griddle cakes to serve with bacon, if she's gonna insist on maple syrup. Maple's a breakfast food, pure and simple, and expensive besides. Better be a meal for guests.

Otherwise, you use molasses or crumbled brown sugar to sweeten, as God intended.

[mme_hardy]

Historically, maple syrup is the cheap source of sugar in New England, and was used to sweeten things like Boston baked beans. (Very good if done properly, and only slightly sweet.) A relic of this use is the rating code for maple syrup, which is based on how mild the sugar based from the syrup would be; the highest rating, AA, has the least maple flavor. (My husband and I always preferred B for table use.)

Which is to say, if you are a sinner and believe in sweet cornbread, maple syrup would be a perfectly appropriate (if expensive, in modern days) way to do it.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

"Bless your heart, honey, if you want a cake, make a cake."

Well, thank the Lord you added that! I was getting ready to flame someone in this comment so I'm glad you told me who. Except I already quit the Times, and New York anything.

"When it smells like chestnuts roasting on a street corner in December"

Tell them down here we don't have any chestnuts or December either.

Maple syrup! I hope it sticks to their skillet. They can pour some molasses on it at the table if they want to, but put the butter on first or it will slide off.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Toby and I both like sweet cornbread, but we bow to our Southern heritage by calling it Yankee cornbread. :) (Our go-to recipe is this one from Jon Bonnell, a local restaurateur who happily gives away all his recipes if you email him.) I did recently find out that the reason Southern cornbread doesn't have sugar in it is that the earlier varieties of corn used for it were sweeter.

I'm mostly annoyed that she's not taking the simplest step to get the skillet hot by simply throwing it into the oven while it's preheating and she's making the rest of the batter.

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

Yip. The batter should sizzle when you pour it in.

[madrobins]

Gah.

Me, I add a little chili and cumin to my cornbread. This sounds like a cupcake. Meh.