#quickbreads

Cornbread!

I’m not good baker but this is very easy and I’ve been eating it since I was a kid. Passed down from my grandmother to my mother to me. The photo on the the recipe in the Fannie Farmer Cookbook which I angrily overwrote with the CORRECT recipe from my mom. I could just post this but there’s other things I disagree with that you need to know about so I’m typing it up for you.

You will need (sorry about the American measurements, let me know if you have any idea how to convert these to weights): 

-cornmeal, 1 cup

-flour, 1 cup

-brown sugar, 1/3 of a cup

-baking soda, 1 teaspoon

-salt, 1 teaspoon

-buttermilk, 1 1/2 cups, but honestly just make clabbered milk, instructions below in recipe: for this you’ll need milk and some kind of acid like vinegar or lemon juice

-eggs, 2

-butter, shortening, bacon grease, or whatever, 1/2 cup (best if you make it liquid before cooking but whatever)

-cast iron skillet, or you can use whatever baking pan but my grandmother will begin manifesting physically in your home (no really though it’s fine, anything shallow and wideish like a brownie pan)

-some tinfoil, possibly

Procedure:

preheat the oven to AT MOST 400F, maybe 350F if you’re using a cast iron skillet (the picture Is Wrong). 

Reason: If you’re doing this in a brownie pan it might be okay, but if you’re doing it in a skillet, the top gets really browned way way before the middle is cooked. The pictured cornbread above was baked at 400F for just fifteen minutes and the top got browner than I’d like. I then had to cover it with foil and bake it for like another fifteen minutes or something to get the middle set. So, slower and lower is better. I’m still messing with this to find the optimal combination.

Anyway. Now that your oven is preheating, clabbered milk time!

Put one and a half cups of milk in a small bowl or something like that. Take like, a teaspoon and a half of your acid (doesn’t have to be precise) and dump it in the milk. Stir a bit. Set it aside until you need it. 

Okay. Take the flour, cornmeal, brown sugar, baking soda, and salt. Just mix them up. 

Now, dump in the buttermilk, eggs, and butter into the bowl and mix that up really well. The recipe above says you have to blend the eggs well before putting them in but, eh....I’ve never had a problem, so whatever. Just make sure all the wet ingredients and dry ingredients are integrated into one smooth, homogeneous, slightly weird looking mass.

Spray or butter your skillet/pan/whatever with your nonstick material of choice. 

Dump the mixture in.

Stick it in the oven. Bake until you can stick a fork inside it and it comes out clean. 

For me, this batch, that took around half an hour. This may vary depending on the shape and size of your pan. My advice is to start with 20 minutes and add ten minutes every time.

If your top browns really quickly but the middle is still gooey, just cover it up with a bit of tinfoil and you’ll be fine.