Cornbread

American South and Indigenous Americas — corn is a Mesoamerican crop domesticated c. 9,000 years ago; Indigenous North American peoples (Natchez, Cherokee, Creek) were making corn bread before European contact; the Southern cornbread tradition developed through the fusion of Indigenous corn techniques with African American and European baking traditions in the plantation and post-plantation South; Blue Corn Piki Bread (#447) represents the Southwestern Indigenous tradition

The indigenous American grain bread — made from coarsely ground dried corn (maize) rather than wheat, leavened with baking powder or buttermilk-and-baking-soda, baked in a cast-iron skillet or square pan — is the bread that did not travel from Europe but emerged from the Americas, specifically from the intersection of Indigenous American corn culture and the baking traditions of the American South. The North-South divide in American cornbread is almost political: Northern cornbread is sweet, cake-like, and yellow; Southern cornbread is savoury, dense, and golden-brown, baked in a cast-iron skillet that has been preheated with bacon fat or lard until smoking-hot. The skillet-preheating step is not optional in the Southern tradition — it produces a sizzling contact between the batter and the pan that creates the characteristic crackling-crisp base crust that is the signature of a proper Southern cornbread.

Served warm from the skillet at the Southern table as the bread for barbecue, beans, greens, and chili; crumbled into a glass of cold buttermilk (a Southern food tradition), eaten as a cereal; as the base for cornbread dressing at Thanksgiving; the hot-from-skillet cornbread with a pat of butter melting into the crackling crust is a Southern comfort food with no adequate description except the eating of it