Cornbread Unboxed

• Cornmeal

• Flour

• Cooking oil

• 1 Egg

• Hot water (or optionally buttermilk)

Preheat oven to 350º. Place cast iron skillet on stove and turn to medium. Put approximately ¼ inch oil in bottom of cast iron pan. Combine two parts cornmeal to one part flour, 1 egg and some hot water or buttermilk into a bowl. Stir together well, incorporating egg fully, until the mixture is a thick but pour-able batter consistency. Once oil is hot carefully pour batter into cast iron pan. Oil will rise around the batter going up the side of the pan. Do not overfill. Leave the cornbread on the burner for a bit. Letting the sides and bottom fry, and forming a crispy delicious crust. Transfer to oven for approximately 45 minutes, or until cornbread is done through. 

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What can be said about cornbread?  Where I live, cornbread is ubiquitous. I can’t remember a day in the past twenty-five years when I have been in my mother’s house and there wasn’t cornbread there. 

We have it with beans, with soup, and with chilli. We bake it into casseroles and we put it into salads. We butter it, steaming hot fresh from the cast iron skillet and eat it on its own. We have even been known to crumble it into milk and eat it like cereal. It is on the menus of local restaurants and it has shown up at the deli sections of grocery stores and gas stations. We love cornbread.

We love normal cornbread.  We don’t love the cornbread mix that comes in the little blue and white box. I don’t know anyone who likes that mix. When I had my first place on my own, I thought that cornbread was going to be this complex, complicated culinary concoction. I was intimidated. I didn’t know the ingredients, or the ratios. I didn’t have a cast iron skillet. I made the mistake of trying to make cornbread from the little box. I followed the instructions. The batter looked like it should. I put it into the oven waited as it went from cornbread batter to cornbread. The batter baked up beautifully. It was just a bit brown on top, and bright yellow when sliced. I was proud of myself for making my first pone of cornbread, and looking forward to dinner. My first bite convinced me that this ain’t my mamma’s cornbread. It was too sweet. And would throw off the flavor of whatever it was served with. 

So I called my mom. She told me the recipe. I bought a cast iron skillet and never looked back. It really is a simple scalable recipe, and it is pretty forgiving too. 

While it is acceptable to make cornbread using another vessel, it really is recommended to use a cast iron skillet. My mom swears by it. After making cornbread for twenty years myself, I can attest that cast iron is definitely the way to go. Get your oil nice and hot on the stovetop, and when you pour the cornbread batter in, it fries, forming a delicious crispy crust. This just doesn’t work the same in other bakeware.

You may be intimidated by cast iron. There is a bit more upkeep and maintenance involved with the usage of a cast iron skillet.  This basically boils down to two steps. Fully dry cast iron cookware after washing it. Once it is fully dry season it by coating it with oil and heating it up. 

We use the standard recipe for cornbread most of the time, especially for soup beans. However, we may modify it. Sometimes we dice up some onions into the batter if we are having white bean and kale soup. We might pour a can of cream style corn and a can of diced tomatoes and green chiles when we are having chilli. 

Other than modifying the ingredients, we also sometimes change the preparation. If we don’t need a whole pone of cornbread, we might mix up a smaller batch and fry it, in a pan, like pancakes. With onions this is like pan fried hush puppies to go with fried fish. 

As you can tell. Cornbread is versatile, flexible, and can adapt to serve a couple, or a crowd. If you haven’t had cornbread, I hope you will try this recipe and discover how tasty it is as well. If you already love cornbread, let me know what your favorite thing to serve it with is. 

Try the cornbread, it’s delicious.