Cornbread, Southern Style

Southern style cornbread is savory, not sweet and is made mostly from cornmeal with little or no flour.  Yankee cornbread is sweet and with the addition of flour, a finer texture, more like a cake like than cornbread.  Isn’t it funny how the South loves copious amounts of sugar in everything except cornbread?  Southern cornbread is flavored with bacon grease and is cooked in a cast iron skillet.  You see, corn grows readily in the South while wheat just won’t take the South’s heat and humidity.  There's no better source to understand these changes than Glenn Roberts of Anson Mills in Columbia, South Carolina.

During the 19th century, Roberts says, toll milling was the way most farm families got the meal for their cornbread. Farmers took their own corn to the local mill and had it ground into enough cornmeal for their families, leaving behind some behind as a toll to pay the miller. "With toll milling, it was three bags in, three bags out," Roberts explains. "A person could walk or mule in with three bags, take three bags home, and still get chores done."

The mills were typically water-powered and used large millstones to grind the corn. Starting around 1900, however, new "roller mills" using cylindrical steel rollers began to be introduced in the South. Large milling companies set up roller operations in the towns and cities and began taking business away from the smaller toll mills out in the countryside. "The bottom line is they went off stone milling because the economies didn't make sense," Roberts says, "which is why stone milling collapsed after the Depression."

Unlike stone mills, steel roller mills eliminate much of the corn kernel, including the germ; doing so makes the corn shelf stable but also robs it of much flavor and nutrition. The friction of steel rolling generates a lot of heat, too, which further erodes corn's natural flavor. Perhaps the most significant difference, though, is the size of the resulting meal.

"If you're toll milling," Roberts says, "you're using one screen. It's just like a backdoor screen. If you put the grits onto that screen and shake it, coarse cornmeal is going to fall through. The diverse particle size in that cornmeal is stunning when compared to a [steel] roller mill."

When cornmeal's texture changed, cooks had to adjust their recipes. "There's a certain minimum particle size required to react with chemical leaven," Roberts says. "If you are using [meal from a roller mill] you're not going to get nearly the lift. You get a crumbly texture, and you need to augment the bread with wheat flour, or you're getting cake."

The change from stone to steel milling is likely what prompted cooks to start putting sugar in their cornbread, too. In the old days, Southerners typically ground their meal from varieties known as dent corn, so called because there's a dent in the top of each kernel. The corn was hard and dry when it was milled, since it had been "field ripened" by being left in the field and allowed to dry completely.

High-volume steel millers started using corn harvested unripe and dried with forced air, which had less sweetness and corny flavor than its field-ripened counterpart. "You put sugar in the cornmeal because you are not working with brix corn," Roberts says, using the trade term for sugar content. "There's no reason to add sugar if you have good corn."

Ingredients:

2 cups white Cornmeal, stone ground if possible

1 tsp Baking Soda

1 tsp Baking Powder

1/2 tsp Salt

1 Tbsp Sugar

1/2 stick Butter, melted

2 Eggs, beaten

1 1/4 cups Whole Buttermilk

Directions:

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.  Grease a cast iron skillet well with bacon drippings and place over burner to heat. You can melt more than you really need and pour the extra into the batter for flavor.

Melt the butter.  Stir the dry ingredients together to mix well.  Add remaining ingredients all at once and stir only to wet the dry ingredients.  A few lumps are OK.  

Pour into sizzling hot skillet and place in oven.  Bake for 20-25 minutes or top is golden brown.   Allow to cool a little before cutting. 

Use a handle mitt or cool with damp cloth.  It’s easy to forget that handle is over 300 degrees, especially for non cooks.