the.com/cornbread
the staple that started a civil war over whether sugar belongs in it
means A dense, slightly crumbly quick bread made from cornmeal, ranging from sweet and cakey to savory and crumbly depending on whose grandmother made it.
from A plain compound of "corn" and "bread," but "corn" carries history: in older English it meant any grain — wheat, barley, whatever the local staple was. When English speakers reached the Americas and met maize, they slapped the familiar word "corn" onto it, and over time "corn" came to mean maize specifically (at least in American English). The bread followed naturally — Native peoples had ground maize into meal and cooked it long before European arrival, and the colonists adopted both the crop and the technique, giving the word a New World meaning the old grain-word never anticipated.
- north-south divide
- Southerners consider sweetened versions practically cake
- native roots
- Indigenous peoples baked it long before colonists arrived
- depression survivor
- Cheap cornmeal fed families through the hardest decades
- skillet ritual
- True versions demand a screaming-hot cast iron pan
cornbread at louisianas — famous cast-iron cornbread at louisiana's hot sauce museum in new orleans
martha whites cornbread mix — tennessee-based brand that's been the standard packaged mix since 1951