Southern cornbread
Bread is the most basic and satisfying of foods, rightfully called “the staff of life.” While loaves, buns, rolls, baguettes and all the rest are wonderful, still I’m a Southern girl. And that means Southern-styled quick breads like biscuits and cornbread are what I crave.
I stand pretty firmly in the cornbread camp. While I love a good biscuit, unless I need a wrapper for my country ham or a bed for my sorghum, I’ll reach straight for the cornbread every time.
Wedges of gold: baked in cast iron, they're crunchy on the outside, pillow-soft on the inside.
This is problematic now that I live in Los Angeles, because what passes for cornbread here is way too sweet and cake like–and usually as dry as the road into the high desert. Granted, every region has its own take on cornbread, but whatever you grew up with tends to be what you gravitate toward. So if I want a good piece of cornbread, I have to make it myself.
Learning at the side of a mother, grandmother, aunt or older sister is the way such knowledge and technique are usually acquired (let’s face it, in the rural South it was seldom a man doing the teaching or the learning to cook). But as with those cultures that pass down their lore and traditions orally, few ever took the time to write anything down. I didn’t realize until well into my adult years that I’d ever be interested in cooking Southern food, so to my shame, this was not something I absorbed in my youth.
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A few years ago at an International Association of Culinary Professionals conference I met Adam Reid from America’s Test Kitchen, and he was astonished when I told him the best, most authentic recipe I’d yet found for making cornbread as we know it in the South–at least in my part of the South–came from ATK’s cookbook. I applaud these folks for figuring out and recording the measurements and method required to accomplish this feat.
So here’s my confession: My recipe for authentic Southern cornbread comes from ATK’s Yankee kitchen in Boston. Please don’t hate me or judge me a fraud. I think it’s pretty gutsy of me to make this admission.
I hope you’ll give this recipe a try, and don’t shy away from the call for bacon drippings. They make it taste so much better than it would with any other type of fat. And unless you eat the entire skilletful of cornbread by yourself in one sitting (although that could happen) you’re not going to ingest that much dripping.
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A note on the bacon drippings: I’ll save my diatribe on bacon drippings for a separate blog entry, but let me just say that the better the drippings, the better your cornbread will be, so collect them from good, smoky bacon.
Southern Cornbread
from The America’s Test Kitchen Family Cookbook, with my asides
4 tsp. bacon drippings (there are 3 teaspoons in a tablespoon, so I just use a slightly rounded tablespoon)
drippings: pure porky nectar
1 cup yellow cornmeal
2 tsp. sugar
1 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. baking soda
1/3 cup rapidly boiling water (don’t be lazy & try to get by with hot tap water)
3/4 cup buttermilk
1 large egg, lightly beaten
Position the oven rack in the lower-middle of the oven. Put the bacon drippings in an 8-inch cast iron skillet, set the skillet in the oven, and preheat the oven to 450ºF.
Whisk 2/3 cup of the cornmeal with sugar, baking powder, salt and baking soda in a small bowl and set aside. (Sift the baking powder and baking soda if needed so you don’t get tiny pockets of rising agent in the final product.)
Put the remaining 1/3 cup of the cornmeal into a medium-sized bowl, add the boiling water and stir to make a stiff mush. Gradually whisk in the buttermilk until smooth, working out any lumps. Now whisk in the egg and then gently fold in the dry ingredients until just combined. (Gently fold, because what gives cornbread its rise is the chemical reaction of the buttermilk’s acid with the base of the baking soda and baking powder. If you stir aggressively or dawdle between this point and oven time, you’ll lose that rising power, and the cornbread will be heavy and dense.)
When the oven has fully preheated, the skillet and drippings will be “rippin’ hot,” as ATK’s Julia Collin-Davison likes to say. Carefully remove the hot skillet from the oven, pour the melted drippings into the batter and stir, then pour the batter into the skillet. Bake until golden brown, between 15 and 20 minutes, depending on your oven.
Turn the cornbread out onto a wire rack and let cool a few minutes before falling face down on it.
Gone!
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