Cornbread

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.