Amen, but I prefer high butterfat butter to vegetable oils: http://www.ansonmills.com/recipes/464

A serious argument [0] can be made that sugar crept in due to the switch from stone milling to steel rollers circa 1900 which greatly affected the flavor of corn meal due to the amount of the kernel being lost but also the heat generated.

Kind of a double whammy... the heat robs it of flavor which is made up for by adding sugar and also decreases the nutrient value of the meal by milling out the germ.

[0]: http://www.seriouseats.com/2014/08/why-southern-cornbread-sh...

Well, you just blew my mind with that last link. I'll have to give that recipe a try as well, I'm pretty sure it'll be worth it. Thanks!

Huh. Wouldn't it be possible to achieve the same result with a steel mill if its surface was irregular? Sounds cheaper than stone. Won't correct the unripe corn harvest, though.

If you haven't already try lard.

But understand that typically, American grocery store lard (the sort that comes in shelf-stable buckets) uses partially hydrogenated oils containing trans fats; After destroying the lard industry in a slanderous PR war early last century ("It's digestible!"), eventually the vegetable shortening / margarine industry (Crisco et al) decided they needed something to sell to very poor people and people following an insistent recipe, so they applied their hydrogenation tech to porkfat feedstocks, creating a product that did not need to be refrigerated.

According to current nutritional doctrine, you should not buy unrefrigerated pork fat products because of trans fats, even if pork fat itself is no longer vilified.

Try the fresh meat aisle. Usually found in 1-5 lb refrigerated blocks near the pork & beef around these parts.

Lard renders it non-vegetarian, which can be a significant change.

And the eggs don't?

No, eggs make it non-vegan.

Great read. Thanks for the article.

> Only crazy people put sugar in cornbread

or anyone that reads the cornmeal box.

Here's a tip that makes the sugar component more worth-while without changing an overall savory dish into something else.

Use that same iron skillet, but preheat the skillet in the oven at 475. Pull it out, reduce the oven to 400, oil the skillet and pour the batter. Bake like normal.

The sugar component makes for a caramelized shell when introduced into a hot skillet quickly that has a nearly non-perceivable sweetness, but adds quite a bit to the texture if serving sliced as a side dish.

Top it off with some honey butter and it's so delicious:

Half a stick of butter

A few tablespoons of honey

Melt the butter and then place it in the fridge for maybe 5 minutes or until it starts to firm up slightly. Take the now semi-solid butter and add honey and whisk (using a fork works fine) for a minute or two until you get the honey well mixed in. Spread on warm cornbread and enjoy.

This, to me, is cake. Literally. Substitute more cornmeal for the flour. Perfection.

P.S. your "1/4 cooking oil" should be "1/4 cup cooking oil" right?

You are correct, edited for clarity.

This recipe, like the original, suffers from a bizarre lack of bacon grease.

And crushed bacon. You people are making me hungry.

You know, I've been looking for something fun to eat all day. Not because I'm hungry but because I like to cook and I've been in a lull lately.

I have this in the oven now and this thread as put some life into my kitchen today. Thank you so much for this post, it's been the highlight of my day.

As a side note: This only strengthens my choice of having well seasoned cast-iron pans in my kitchen. They are truly my best piece of cookware and they're some of the cheapest too.

I loathe sweet cornbread, but 1 tsp honey didn't make it sweet to the taste and may have helped it get a nice crust. As did cooking it for just 10 minutes on very hot coals of course.

I think next time I'll try with much less (or no) wheat flour.

Southerners are never averse to sugar.

I'm of the impression that proper southern cornbread is the version without sugar (as well as cooked in a preheated cast iron skillet that goes back into the oven), whereas northern cornbread has sugar. (Wikipedia mostly agrees, at least on the sugar front).

This caused me problems when I tried to make cornbread on my own for the first time after moving north for college. It wasn't as good as I remembered from home until I realized I had to take out the sugar.

We are in our cornbread!

In terms of things like "sweet tea" or Pepsi, that's very true. But having grown up in the south, and still living there, I've never known it to be commonplace to make cornbread sweet here. There's also a deep divide among southerners on whether BBQ sauce should be sweet or not.

Personally, even being from eastern NC where vinegary based BBQ rules supreme, I prefer the sweeter style of BBQ. YMMV.