ABRIE
FH
IS
TO
RYOF
weekend
cookingCornbread isn’t usually a hot topic at the
dinner table, but its story is worth sharing.if you prefer!Much of the cornbread consumed
this month will come from
blue-and-white boxes of Jiffy mix.
The corn muffin mix debuted
in 1950, and today it’s one of
the best-selling dried goods in the
country, praised by home cooks
and chefs alike. You can’t beat the
price: A box costs about 50 cents!Corn was a staple ofcornmeal mixed with water, salt and fat.
Milk and eggs were colonial additions.104 FOOD NETWORK MAGAZINE ●NOVEMBER 2020
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The Original
Cornbread
Indigenous diets long before
European settlers arrived ..
in America. Native Americans
made an early, unleavened version
of cornbread from a batter of-+------~-------
Time for Hoecakes
In her cookbook Jubilee, food historian
Toni Tipton-Martin gives Black chefs long-
overdue credit for perfecting cornmeal cakes.
In the late 1700s, James Hemings,
the enslaved French-trained
chef who worked on
Thomas Jefferson's
plantation, served
them with fried
chicken and gravy.-----+---=====~~A~-----+------~
Dressing It Up Sweetening the Deal
The earliest cornbread dressing New 20th-century milling
was conceived as a way to stretch machinery led to finer cornmeal
meager food rations. Food scholar that wasn't as sweet. Cooks
Michael Twitty writes that during compensated by adding sugar
the first half of the 1800s, enslaved and wheat flour to cornbread,
people in the South cooked crumbles which made it cakelike. Whether
of leftover cornbread with ingredients or not sugar belongs in cornbread
like onions and peppers. is still up for debate.-+--~====~~ h~======~--------+--~---
Out of the Box J iF"Fy· Breaking Bread
corn murr•n Most of today's cornbread is a
m. tx '" departure from the original:
The recipe on the opposite page
is made with buttermilk and
sugar, which never would have
appeared in precolonial recipes.
You can adjust the sugar to
taste-leave it out or double it