I just got off the phone with Regina Charbonneau down at Twin Oaks Bed & Breakfast in Natchez. I'd phoned her because she wrote this great piece on the Atlantic's Food Channel about making cane syrup in the South. I wanted to find out when Judge Bramlette's syrup making Saturday was going to be this fall. Anyway, because Natchez is only an hour north of St. Francisville, my Louisiana hometown, we share a lot in common, especially the experience of shocking Yankees and other non-Southerners by showing them that the crazy, only-in-a-novel stories that we've told them really are true. As my wife will tell you, "I thought he was a pathological liar until he took me down there and I met the people he had told me about. It was all true! They really are like that."
Turns out Regina and I know a couple of the same people, but she doesn't know David and Edie Varnado of Camp Topisaw, the Mississippi folks who hand-craft superlative soaps and candles. I never recommend any products on this blog that I don't use myself and believe in, so I can tell you that you can't go wrong ordering from Camp Topisaw.
Regina has a Southern food blog on the Atlantic's Food Channel. If you get around to making her cornbread pudding stuffed with mustard greens recipe before I do, you've got to tell me how it turned out. Here she weighs in on the sweet cornbread vs. savory cornbread controversy. Excerpt:
Cornbread in the South is about as controversial as gumbo. Everyone has a recipe and everyone has an opinion. I love cornbread, so I like both savory and sweet. I also like honey butter on my savory corn bread and jalapeno corn bread, andouille and crawfish cornbread, broccoli and cheese cornbread, cracklin' cornbread, sun dried tomato and bacon cornbread, and I especially like my recipe for cornbread pudding stuffed with mustard greens. When it comes to making cornbread dressing, there is no question you have to use savory cornbread. The one thing I do that is a little different and adds a touch of sweetness and helps the texture is add creamed corn to my cornbread batter. I like the texture and taste of sweet corn in the cornbread and dressing. I add heavy cream and eggs to create a custard texture that I like in a dressing.
I am pleased to report that Regina's recipe is mostly on the side of the angels -- the savory tribe -- in this dispute.
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PS -- having contributed that bit of local folklore, I have to admit that I do love cornbread, though I'm afraid most of my experience doesn't extend beyond the Jiffy mix in a box. ;-)
I am pleased to report that Regina's recipe is mostly on the side of the angels -- the savory tribe -- in this dispute.
After my sister and I read this, we wondered how someone who claims to be Southern could possibly issue such a treasonous usurpation against the Confederacy. But then we realized that you were part of Louisianna that was heavily influenced by France, and that explained everything to us.
Just remember that southeastern New England is also home to an ur cornbread classically made with white cap flint corn meal (there are only three grist mills that produce it now: Gray's, Carpenter's and Kenyon's - this type of corn is so hard that it really wears down mills) without much or any sugar: the venerable jonnycake (there are thick and thin versions - I prefer the thin, lacy kind). Now, folks often top it with butter and syrup, but the cake itself is not. I don't think it's coincidence that this part of the North favors white cornmeal: the ports in the area (especially Bristol - now part of Rhode Island but formerly part of Massachusetts) were intimately involved in the Triangle Trade, and white cap flint corn is the ancient corn type that early settlers bred from the native stock.
Anyway, jonnycakes can support both sweet and savory uses. They are the ur cornbread for European Americans.
http://www.graysgristmill.com/recipes.html
http://www.farmfresh.org/food/member.php?fn=374
http://www.kenyonsgristmill.com/yankee_grandmother.html
Southerners should not assume that they are the only 'Murkins who are passionate about cornbreads.
If you're visiting Rhode Island and nearby in early May, you should partake of the May breakfasts.
I'll eat either, but prefer the savory. Up here in Boston, they put so much sugar in the cornbread (at least where I've had it) that they might as well slap some frosting on it and call it a cupcake. Not my style at all.
My wife is from Georgia, and I'm from New Hampshire. The first time I made cornbread for her, she told me it needed more sugar and more butter. Her claim was it was the Southern (and therefore proper) way to make cornbread. I prefer it with habanero or jalapeno peppers, myself.
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