Cornbread, Skillet-Style — No Sugar, Cast Iron, Buttermilk

The position

There is a long-running, half-serious argument about whether cornbread should contain sugar. The Southern tradition — and Edna Lewis was firm here — says no. Northern cornbread tends to be sweeter, more cake-like. Both exist. This recipe is the Southern, sugar-free, hot-skillet version.

The dish is older than the United States. Cornbread is a descendant of Indigenous cornmeal flatbreads. The cast iron skillet and the buttermilk are colonial-era adaptations. The technique stabilized in the 19th century into roughly what you cook today.

Recipe (8 wedges)

Ingredients

2 cups stone-ground yellow cornmeal (medium grind)
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
2 large eggs
1¾ cups buttermilk
4 tbsp unsalted butter or bacon fat
(Optional: ¼ cup grated cheddar, or a handful of corn kernels, or chopped scallions)

Steps

Put a 10-inch cast iron skillet in the oven. Preheat the whole thing to 220°C / 425°F.
While it heats, whisk cornmeal, salt, baking soda in a bowl. In a second bowl, whisk eggs into buttermilk.
Combine wet and dry. Stir minimally — just until no dry pockets. Lumps are fine.
When the oven is hot, pull the skillet out (handle it with both hands and a thick towel — it will be screaming hot). Add the butter; swirl as it foams.
Pour the batter in. It should hiss.
Bake 18-22 minutes until the top is golden and the edges have pulled away from the pan.
Loosen with a knife. Invert onto a board. Slice into 8 wedges.
Serve hot, with butter, with pot liquor, with collards, with chili, with anything.

Why no sugar

Lewis's argument was that good cornmeal already tastes faintly sweet. The function of the bread is to balance and absorb — pot liquor, gravy, beans. Sugar competes. If you want sweet cornbread, you actually want corn cake; make that instead.

Storage

Day-of, hot, is best. Day two, toast slices in butter — surprisingly good. Day three, crumble into milk for breakfast (this is an old practice, called cornbread and milk, and it predates cereal by a century).

The two cornbread schools

There is a long-standing American cornbread split: the Northern,
sweet, cake-like version (sugar, all-purpose flour, often eggs in
large quantity); and the Southern, savory, dense version (no sugar,
white cornmeal, buttermilk, lard or bacon fat, cast iron skillet).
The split runs roughly along the Mason-Dixon line and reflects two
different culinary traditions.

The Southern version is closer to the indigenous and African
ancestral form. Pre-colonial Indigenous American cornmeal flatbreads
contained no wheat flour, no sugar, no eggs. The cast iron skillet
and the buttermilk are 18th- and 19th-century adaptations; the
core dish predates them by a thousand years.

Edna Lewis's version

Edna Lewis's cornbread, in The Taste of Country Cooking, is the
canonical written version of the Southern Black tradition. Her
recipe is unfussy: white cornmeal, buttermilk, salt, baking soda, a
tablespoon of bacon fat in a hot cast iron skillet. No flour. No
sugar. Twelve minutes at 425 degrees.

The result is dense, slightly crumbly, with a hard outer crust that
forms against the hot fat in the skillet. The flavor is corn-
forward; the dish is structural, not sweet.

What it goes with

The plate the cornbread completes:

Greens with pot liquor.
A bowl of beans (pinto, red beans, white beans) cooked low and
slow with smoked meat.
A small portion of slow-cooked protein.

The cornbread is the vehicle for the pot liquor. You break a piece,
crumble it into the bowl of greens, eat with a spoon. The dish only
works as a system.

Sourcing the cornmeal

Stone-ground cornmeal — coarser, darker, with more germ — produces
better cornbread than the supermarket fine yellow cornmeal. Anson
Mills (Columbia, SC) is the reliable mail-order source for heirloom
cornmeals; their Antebellum coarse white is the historically
appropriate variety.