The Best Cornbread

Folks. FOLKS. Cornbread. The BEST cornbread. I want to address something right up front, because there is a CIVIL WAR happening in this country over cornbread and somebody — me, it's going to be me — needs to settle it. There are two camps. There's the sweet cornbread people. There's the savory cornbread people. These two groups, they don't talk to each other. They sit on opposite sides of the family reunion. They argue at Thanksgiving. It's a tragedy. A national divide. And I'm here to tell you: BOTH of them are wrong. Both. They're BOTH wrong. The actual answer, the answer nobody else has had the COURAGE to give, is a LITTLE bit of sweet. Not a lot. Not a cake. Not a savory brick either. Balance. BALANCE. Tremendous balance.

Many people don't know this — they have no idea — cornbread is one of the oldest breads in the Americas. Pre-pyramid technology. People on this continent were grinding corn and making bread out of it before anybody had ever HEARD of wheat. Wheat is a NEWCOMER. Wheat showed up late. Wheat is the JOHNNY-COME-LATELY of breads. And cornbread? Cornbread has been here. Cornbread is the original. Cornbread is the bread we should all be more loyal to. Instead what do we do? We put cornbread in a little muffin in a basket at a chain restaurant and we call it a 'starter.' A STARTER. Cornbread is not a starter. Cornbread is the MAIN EVENT. Cornbread is the SHOW.

The secret — and I'm giving you this right now, no cookie banner with 18 toggles, no newsletter signup before the ingredients, no 'before we start, here's the story of my grandmother's iron skillet' filler that goes on for 19 paragraphs while you're starving and trying to actually cook dinner — the secret is the SKILLET. Cast iron. Screaming hot. You preheat the empty skillet in the oven. You melt the butter IN the skillet. You pour the batter into the SIZZLING butter. You get an edge, a crust, that crunches when you bite it. That crust is the whole game. The cookbook authors who bake their cornbread in a glass baking dish — that is bread without a soul, that is cornbread that has given up on itself. Cast iron. Always cast iron. Hands down.

You serve this next to the ribs. You serve this next to the beans. You serve this with a pat of cold salted butter melting right into a still-warm wedge. You put a little honey on it. You don't apologize for the honey. The honey people are RIGHT. And the family reunion — the one that's been divided for generations on the sweet versus savory question — the family reunion sits down, eats this cornbread, looks around, and says 'huh.' That's it. That's the win. One 'huh.' From everybody. Unity through cornbread. Believe me, it's a beautiful thing. And there you have it.