Thanksgiving is just around the corner, and I'm already planning the menu. If course, being in the south, there has to be cornbread and chicken and dressing made with cornbread in it. The thing is, I never was able to learn my mom's cornbread recipe. She was the type of cook who could just eyeball it and it turned out perfectly every time. Me, I have to measure anything I bake.
The recipe she used was simple enough, yet I cannot find a single recipe that fits it. She just used yellow corn meal, a little bit of flour (like maybe a tablespoon or two for a couple of cups of cornmeal. I've found several that use almost a 1-1 ratio which is way too much flour), egg, cooking oil, and milk or buttermilk.
She never used even a teaspoon of sugar, nor any extra stuff like baking powder or baking soda, nor did she use self-rising cornmeal or self rising flour. But every recipe I find seems to have one or more of these ingredients, or has way too much flour, or something. Anyone know of a recipe out there that sounds like what I'm describing?
ETA: So far this is the closest recipe I've found:
http://www.food.com/recipe/buttermilk...
The main differences being that my mom used more oil (maybe half a cup or so? I'm not great at eyeballing which is exactly why she was never able to teach me lol). And she did not add baking powder or baking soda. Any ideas how I could adapt this recipe to fit hers more closely?
My favorite southern cornbread has no sugar and no white flour, but does have baking soda, egg, and buttermilk. I don't recall any "southern" style (no or very little white flour, no or very little sugar) cornbread recipe that did not have either baking powder or baking soda.
I just found my paternal grandmother's cornbread recipe. It's also not what you are looking for in that it's 1.5 to 2 c white cornmeal, 1/2 c yellow cornmeal, water, and salt. That's all. Pour into pans with melted crisco or bacon grease. I loved it but it was more like fried polenta, hard and crispy, and it didn't crumble easily for adding to soups or stuffings.
Here's a previous chowhound discussion that also gets into the white vs. yellow cornmeal Southern controversy and includes several family recipes:
http://www.chowhound.com/post/traditi...
and if you google "southern cornbread recipe" you might find one. I went through a few on my search and didn't find any that met what you are looking for.
I live in Boston and grew up in NC. I cannot and will not eat "yankee cornbread", which is mostly white flour and full of sugar. The chowhound discussion I linked to asks why southerners don't want sugar in their cornbread while they put so much sugar in their iced tea. My answer is, cornbread is one of the few things southerners don't put sugar in. We want it taste like corn, not like cake, and we do have plenty of overly sweet desserts. I once went out with my roommate in Calif. and the blind law student she assisted. He put around 8 packets of sugar in his iced tea. I asked him where he was from, he said, North Carolina. I don't drink iced tea now, either.
Did your mother make flat cornbread?
The ingredients from the cornmeal package is
1 cup flour, 1 cup cornmeal, 1 egg, 1 cup milk, 1/4 cup vegetable oil, 1 tsp salt, 4 teaspoons baking powder and 1-2 tablespoons sugar(optional).
Why is the 1 to 1 ratio sounding off to you?
It sounds like your mother was baking Johnny cakes.
Here is a recipe I found.
http://allrecipes.com/recipe/7123/joh...
Oh if your mom used buttermilk that may be why no leavening. Try googling buttermilk cornbread.
Many southerners very often include minimal to no white flour in their traditional cornbread. And it is definitely called cornbread, not johnny cakes. Johnny cakes are New England, where I live, and I do like them.
so I could just as easily say, why does no white flour sound off to you? There are many different customs.
I think it is much more common in Texas and Florida to include white flour, but in southeast coastal areas...NC, SC, GA, not very often at all, but you can always find recipes that include it. Maybe Miss, Ala, La, Tn, as well, but I'm not at all sure. It may well be an artifact of civil war and reconstruction when white flour was not available, I don't know. Also, lots of migration among the southern states and some combined their traditional native state recipes for what was available and customary in the new home.
Also, not sure of current practices. I was born 1955 in North Carolina around a lot of traditional family cooks and white flour and sugar were both out of the question, would be met with looks of horror if anyone had proposed it, which they didn't. Anyway, see the chowhound discussion I linked to for, well, a discussion. I'm sure there are others as well on the site. As that discussion addresses in some posts, cornbread without white flour was often served along with soft white flour biscuits, so many the contrast was seen as desirable.
My mom didn't make Johnny cakes, but my paternal grandmother did. Luckily that was a recipe I managed to get from her before she passed!
But I do remember watching my mom make her cornbread; she would add only a dash of flour, a couple of tablespoons at most for the cup or 2 of cornmeal she used, hence why the 1-1 ratio is not what I'm looking for. And she did also add buttermilk, in fact now I remember it's the only thing we ever seemed to buy buttermilk for!
Did she use buttermilk? If not in liquid form, perhaps the powdered SACO dried buttermilk?
And it's unclear from your post whether she used egg.
There had to be something in there to cause it to rise as "bread".
That discussion Madrid linked to has good info to help you solve your mystery.
It appears that you have to use either buttermilk or sour milk if you don't want to use baking powder.
well, that's not how my grandmother did it. No baking powder, no baking soda, no buttermilk, no milk, no white flour, as I explained in my previous post. "have to use" is very relative. If you want a certain result, yes. If you want a different result that tastes like your family made it, no.
How did she get it to rise then?
Though I do know from experience that a flat cornbread is pretty good. I have accidentally forgotten the baking powder a time or two.
Totally different texture.
Now I have an idea.
Let's all make cornbread, take pictures and compare the results.
It seems we may be talking about 2 or more totally different corn breads and the only thing they have in common is the cornmeal.
I made a mistake. When I think of baked breads, they need leavening. And every recipe I found had either sour or buttermilk or a leavening agent.
The flat breads I found with cornmeal were called Johnny cakes.
Johnny cakes are not from New England. Nearly every southern cookbook I own has Johnny cakes.
They could either be baked or on the griddle. They make a fair substitute to go with pinto beans.
Wait a minute, another idea. Did your grandmother beat the egg whites separately? That could be the leavening agent.
my grandmother made a very flat cornbread, as I posted above, that had no leavening agent at all. No eggs, no milk, so there was no egg white to beat. It was cornmeal, water, and lots of crisco or bacon grease. It was not called johnnycake, though it may well have been what other people would call johnnycake.
I'm not going to bake it and post it, because it's not something I want to eat. It probably had its origins in the lack of certain ingredients in the American south during and after the Civil War even before the depression and WWII, but also in the Native American cooking in that part of the southeastern US well before that. It was good at the time with lots of butter on it (though knowing my grandmother and her embrace of all new trends, it was probably margarine), but it could not be crumbled into soup, beans, or stuffing/dressing. It was like hard polenta. I didn't realize that until I had polenta for the first time as a 20 something.
I have lots of southern cookbooks, and only one has a recipe called johnnycakes; that's Roof to Leaf, while my New England books have several. I am talking here about southeast cookbooks, on the seaboard, not about Kentucky, Texas, Florida, etc. However, most do have a recipe that could be very much like what others call johnny cakes; in some it may be called "corn pone" and in some it has a native American name (no leavening there either), but none are Griddled or baked as "cakes" but baked in one mass in a cast iron frying pan.
New England cornbread and Midwest cornbread (husband from Iowa) recipes don't appeal to me much. I do like variants on the Tex-Mex American southwest side with whole corn, jalapeño peppers, sour cream etc. Each to his/her own. My son loves the cakey sweet stuff and won't eat my favorite. The history of making bread-like stuff with corn of all kinds is hugely varied and stretches across the Republic of Georgia, Italy, some other parts of Eastern Europe, all outside where corn originated in what we now call North, South, and Central America etc.
Just in the southeast alone, as the chowhound thread indicates, you can get huge arguments over white vs. yellow cornmeal, even before you get to the arguments over the other ingredients, or throw in American southwest recipes that can include red and/or blue cornmeal. Then you can talk about grits vs. polenta vs. coarsely ground "whole" corn meal vs. finely ground.
I personally think my grandmother's recipe would be a lot better with buttermilk and an egg and a bit of baking powder, but that's essentially what I bake anyway. I do like an American Test Kitchen recipe that adapted a "true" southern" cornbread recipe by cooking some of the coarsely ground cornmeal like polenta before incorporating it into the rest of the mixture. It gives a more tender, moist crumb without adding white flour.
However....I was trying to answer the OP's request and never intended to get into an extended discussion of variants. I just wanted to point out that not every tradition requires leavening of any sort, or white flour.
I am sure someone or someones have written dissertation(s) on this.
Not to get off topic, but do cornbread recipe with baking powder. Double the recipe. Put half in the pan, top with browned seasoned ground beef, green chilies and a can of cream style corn. Sprinkle with lots of shredded cheese. Top with the rest of the cornbread mixture.
Bake at 425 until done.
Now back on topic, this thread is making me want cornbread but it is too hot to heat up the house.
Yes, she used buttermilk and an egg.
I found 3 that might be what you are looking for.
I will start with the oldest.
This one comes from "Housekeeping in Old Virginia" copyright 1879
Light corn bread
Pour 1 quart of boiled milk over 1 pint of cornmeal. Add a teaspoon of salt, a teaspoon of cream of tartar, half a teaspoon of soda, three well beaten eggs, four tablespoons of flour, a little butter.
No other instructions listed.
Or here is the other one from the same book.
1 pint sifted meal, 1 teaspoon salt, cold water sufficient to make a stiff dough.
Work well with hands, pat into long narrow pones, 6 or 7 inches long and as wide as the wrist. Bake quickly in a hot pan.
Ingredients from the White House Cookbook copyright 1905
Virginia Corn Bread
3 cups white corn meal, 1 cup flour, 1 tablespoon sugar, 1 teaspoon salt, 2 heaping teaspoons baking powder, 1 tablespoon lard, 3 cups milk and 3 eggs.
Corn bread
2 cups sifted meal, half a cup flour, 2 cups sour milk, 2 well beaten eggs, half a cup of molasses or sugar, a teaspoon of salt, 2 tablespoons melted butter
Boston Corn Bread
1 cup sweet milk, 2 cups sour milk, 2/3 cup molasses, 1 cup wheat flour, 4 cups cornmeal and 1 teaspoon of soda.
This recipe is steamed for 3 hours then browned in the oven.
Lastly from the 1943 edition of Joy of Cooking
Corn bread II
1 cup yellow cornmeal, 2 tablespoons bread flour, 1 tablespoon sugar, 1 1/4 teaspoons baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1 egg, 1 tablespoon melted lard or butter, 1/2 cup milk.
That last one is almost it. She never used sugar or baking powder, and she used vegetable oil instead of butter or lard (and I remember she used more than a tablespoon), and buttermilk instead of milk.
http://www.food.com/recipe/buttermilk...
So far this is the closest I've found.
I figure on that one recipe you could leave out the molasses and substitute buttermilk for the sour milk.
My great grandmother called regular milk sweet milk and buttermilk sour milk.
Good luck with your replication.
Actually, yes. Looking at the first one I could leave out the molasses and switch the butter and some of the milk for oil (my mom added a bit of vegetable oil in addition to milk). That would be fairly close. Then the main thing would be this recipe uses more flour. Maybe if I only used half the flour? Would I need more cornmeal to balance it? (Can't you tell baking does not come naturally to me? Lol)
Are you sure that dash of flour wasn't actually baking soda or powder? Or could the cornmeal have been self-rising. There are various brands of self-rising cornmeal (e.g. Martha White).
Cornbread can be made with a whole range of flour/cornmeal mixes. While I normally use 1:1, I have used straight cornmeal. I find that to be a lot more crumbly. The cornmeal grind also makes a difference. I think finer works better in a pure corn version. In the 1:1 version the cornmeal shouldn't be too fine; you want a bit of texture.
I don't expect a tablespoon or two of flour to make much difference, but there's no harm in adding it to a straight cornmeal recipe.
Regardless of cornmeal/flour ratio, I expect the batter to have the same basic consistency - pourable. May be a little thicker than pancake batter, and thinner than cake, but not that different. And even that doesn't make a big difference. You could even test the batter by making pancakes from it.
Sugar is entirely optional, even in the 1:1 kind. That's a matter of taste, and isn't require for any structural reason.
A complete lack of baking powder or soda is puzzling. Without some of that, the result will be a flat dense bread, more like a baked mush. Thin crepe like cakes can be made with a with thin batter.
Do you have memories of what the end product was like? That might be more reliable than memories of how it was made.
Absolutely positive she never used baking powder or soda. We never even kept them in the house. Last Thanksgiving she tried to show me how to make it, so I have a good memory of the ingredients, and I remember kinda the ratios, but if I try to eyeball it it would never come out like hers.
Same with the flour and cornmeal. She used regular yellow cornmeal and plain all purpose flour. We never kept another kind in the house. And when she came over last Thanksgiving and made the cornbread, she gave me a list that specifically included regular flour and yellow cornmeal. The cornbread turned out just as good as always.
As far as texture, I remember it being a very thick batter when added to the cast iron skillet, and it was always dense and a little crumbly. It would rise during baking, but not a whole lot.
I wish I had more to go on to describe it but the only other cornbread I have to compare with is my grandmother's on my dad's side (which weren't even cornbread, she made Johnny cakes), and Jiffy mix lol
Does this mean you never got homemade cakes or cookies?
I mean homemade not from a mix.
You just boggled my mind.
I never got homemade cookies or cakes from my mother (born 1932). Plenty from the grandmothers or grandmother surrogates. That's not so uncommon from my experience. My mother did make biscuits most days for dinner and she got the "touch" from her surrogate mother. She hasn't made them for decades, however, and lost the "touch" that I try to acquire, but don't make them often enough.
Haha. Yes. Anything baked came out of a box. Boxed cake or brownies, if we had biscuits or cookies they came out of the tube. The only thing my mom ever baked from scratch was cornbread.
Why not just make a test batch or two? If you are sure you remember all the ingredients then you should be able to make something close. From what you've described, and my own experience, I doubt if any of the ingredient ratios are critical. Mix the dry, add the small liquid quantities (egg and oil), and enough buttermilk to give the right consistency. And bake like other all-cornmeal recipes. It probably will be better if baked in a thin layer, but try to remember what your mom did.
If it comes out too dense and flat, then try one of the recipes with baking soda.
That's my plan, but on Thanksgiving. Any batches that don't turn out right will go in the chicken and dressing. I'll end up making a LOT of cornbread, because we always cook two giant pans (think the giant disposable roasting pans for 25 lb turkeys) of chicken and dressing, and then of course there has to be cornbread on the side. So I'll have a few batches to practice with
this debate transcript on biscuits vs. cornbread may be of interest to some.
I live on the coast now but I am from the mountains of Kentucky. This is how we make ours, we call it skillet cornbread and it is pretty flat but it is not a johnny cake , hoe cakes, or fried corn bread.
1 1/2 cups or cornmeal
1/4 cup of flour
1 1/2 cups buttermilk (whole)
2 eggs
And into a hot cast iron (we use bacon drippings but other things are ok)
Edit to add We call it a pone of cornbread
beautiful! thanks so much. This is what mine looks like at its best, though it does have a bit of baking powder, and no white flour. I love the whole buttermilk when I can get it from a farmstand. That crunchy rim on the outside is prized by many. I preheat the cast iron frying pan with the fat in for a long time. then when I put the batter in, being very careful as it is very hot and I am quite clumsy, stir the hot fat into the batter and then get it back in there as fast as possible.
I'm hoping after all this discussion, your recipe helps the OP!
That is it!! Pretty much. I mean my mom adds some cooking oil but I don't think she uses as much buttermilk either. But hers looks just like that in the skillet-- it doesn't really rise.
Eggs are a leavening agent.
Under what circumstances do eggs leaven/
Yes, they do provide structure and water that can turn into steam. That happens with a thin batter in popovers, dutch baby and yorkshire pudding. But it doesn't puff up in crepes, clafoutis, toad in the hole - where it's too thin, or deep or loaded.
Heavily beaten eggs are the basis for foam cakes
In my experience cornbread without enough egg is more crumbly. Spoon bread is a cornbread variation that uses a lot of egg, and is more custard or pudding like.
Coarse cornmeal mush (polenta/grits) when cooked long and undisturbed can have a spongy texture - until it is stirred. I think that's because the corn particles absorb moisture and swell. That can leave some voids between the particles.
SeriousEats has an article about 'true' Southern cornbread. The author argues that fresh stone ground cornmeal is needed. He claims the old fashion style of meal had a greater range of particle sizes, including fine flour size. A bit of wheat flour may be needed as a substitute if you didn't buy your meal from Anson Mills. He also claims the true stuff is naturally sweeter - something about dent corn that is field dried retains more sweetness than modern commercial field corn. So a bit of sugar may be need to compensate if you didn't buy from Anson.
Beaten egg whites can and are used in many recipes for leavening.
Look up an Angel food cake.
Beaten egg whites are the only leavening.
Pretty much anytime you see fold egg whites in gently, they are being used as a leavening agent.
I mentioned foam cakes in my post. And some spoon bread recipes use separated and beaten eggs; pushing more in the direction of a corn souffle.
But I'm trying to figure out the relevance of the eggs-leavening in these corn pone recipes. There's no beaten egg whites.
I was thinking out loud. Apparently, corn pones and some other cornbread recipes make flat breads not risen breads.
uh, yes. "flatbread" cornbread not risen is very common in certain US southeast areas to this day. Been around for several centuries now, and probably a lot longer from the Native American population. It's not "apparently" to lots of people, it is the "true grit."
Reliable chemical leavenings (not just harsh wood ash based potasium carbonate) became available in the middle 19th c. So some form of un-risen corn pone or cake would have been the norm through out the USA. Wheat flour was more common in the north, and climate more suitable for yeast rising, So corn pone was preserved more as a regional food.
Another consideration was the baking tools. The modern oven gives much better control than a coal or wood fired range, and those were better than open hearth. A variation on cornbread, spider bread or cake, gets its name from the long leg skillet used in open hearths - http://www.chowhound.com/post/cornbre...
The steam supplied by the liquid in eggs is indeed a leavener in both batters and doughs:
I just found a recipe in Vivian Howard's (of Chef's Life TV fame) new cookbook, Deep Run Roots, for "mom's cornpone". It's a lot like my grandmother's recipe...cornmeal, salt, water, and bacon fat or butter,but includes 2 tsp sugar for 2.5 cups cornmeal. No baking powder, baking soda, milk or buttermilk, or eggs. The photograph looks a lot like LaLa's except it's browner and looks crispier, which I guess would be expected given it doesn't have eggs or buttermilk.
The book also has a recipe for "grandma hill's hoecakes", but headnote says Grandma never called them Hoecakes. They were called little cornbreads and sound a lot like what many people call Johnnycakes. This one is cornmeal, buttermilk, salt, 1/2 tsp sugar, diced onion, water, and vegetable oil, and is fried in two tablespoon dollops as "cakes." No egg, no baking powder, no baking soda.
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