Saturday Tweets: Cornbread Controversies, 2×4 Furniture and El Niño

Leave a comment

4 Comments

  1. I have not yet read your tweet about sugar having no place in corn bread for the following reasons: I do not tweet, and the whole concept is so manifestly WRONG. Sugar in cornbread is delightful.

    • You’ll be happy to know that the cornbread I make is a recipe by Josey Baker that contains both sugar and whole wheat flour. But apparently, in certain Southern circles, this is a heresy. Sugar in cornbread is one of those topics, like politics, religion and natural beekeeping, that inspires a considerable amount of vitriol.

    • I did read the article, and what’s interesting there is the fact that our corn is not as sweet and corny as it used to be (unless we’re buying heritage varieties and milling it ourselves). So the sugar vs. no sugar debate rises out of the decline in our food quality. Some cooks, seeking the sweetness of the older corn varieties, started adding sugar to make up for the loss. Some held to the old ways, though I guess they must have made palette adjustments. Thus the debate began. For what its worth, I really like Josey Baker’s sweet cornbread, but I’d like to mill some good corn and make unsweetened cornbread with it.

  2. I’m keeping it as polite as I can: No @#$%!! sugar in cornbread!! (And no prizes for guessing that I’m a native Southerner–Tennessee born and bre[a]d, in my case.) The folk singers Sparky and Rhonda Rucker do a delightful comic riff on cornbread: “It was the leading cause of the Civil War. The Yankees wanted to put sugar in the cornbread!”

    But that said, thanks for the link to the Anson Mills site. Gonna have to try the AM cornbread recipe.

Comments are closed.