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

[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.