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]

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."