Cornbread

Originally written August 8, 2020

The Bitter Southerner published a list of the seven most essential Southern foods. Apparently it’s “controversial.” Now, I don’t understand why it might be. It is a solid list. The cornbread particularly rings true. Sheri Castle acknowledges there’s a white vs yellow meal fued, some families add flour, and, I’d argue most importantly, an obvious lack of sugar.

Why this attention to cornbread? It’s working person’s food. It’s farmer’s food. Despite what you might read in Garden & Gun, the South is historically poor. (We kinda still are.) Corn would grow in a small plot. You’d know someone with grist mill—up until his death in the 1990s, my great-uncle grew his own corn and milled cornmeal for the entire family. And the butter, lard, eggs, and buttermilk in the recipe? All raised and processed on your plot.

It’s about a quality product—the cornmeal came from what we’d call an heirloom crop now. The corn my great-uncle grew was adapted to his home. He didn’t go down to the co-op and purchase seeds every year. He saved from his previous crops, selecting and reinforcing the plants that grew best and produced the best corn for the best meal.

Having had that cornmeal, and later having had heirloom meal from Anson Mills, I can attest to the flavor of good meal. The corn has a subtle sweetness and complex corn and grain flavor. It doesn’t need sugar.

That’s why my mom give the side eye to anyone putting flour and sugar in their cornbread. It’s about class and lose of quality. Subsitence and small-farms couldn’t afford to toss store-bought flour and sugar into a daily staple. The wealthy could afford sugar and white flour, their cornbread—a basic, daily staple—was a sign of their higher class. (And biscuits? Nothing but flour and labor. You do the math on who could afford biscuits.) But also, adding sugar is an attempt to adjust a recipe. With the commodifacation of corn and cornmeal, we lost the complexity and sweetness of localized crops. Home bakers had to add sugar to make it “like mom used to.”

And honestly, that’s why I find this cornbread cake with pimento cheese frosting a good bit offensive. There’s no acknowledgement of what cornbread means to the South, and it’s culture. It isn’t elevating a humble staple of a culture in an understanding way—it’s treating it as basic, as someting in need of dressing up. And with the addition of all that sugar, obviously lacks an understanding of what’s been lost.