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

[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.