The Best Skillet Cornbread

Listen. Cornbread. We are doing cornbread, and we are doing it the way it was DONE, the way it was MEANT to be done, the way my grandmother did it — and she was a TOUGH woman, the toughest, she lived to 96 on a diet of bacon, grits, and pure spite, the woman could swing a cast iron skillet like a weapon and probably did at least once, the family does not talk about it — and this cornbread, MY cornbread, the one I'm about to put in your hands, makes every other cornbread look like a sad wet SPONGE. Not even close. It is a slaughter.

Now let's get something straight. There are people out there — nice people, I'm sure, perfectly lovely people, terrible cooks — who put SUGAR in their cornbread. Sugar. In cornbread. That's not cornbread anymore, friend, that's CAKE. You've baked a cake. Go pour milk on it and tell your dentist. Real cornbread is SAVORY. Real cornbread has a crackling golden crust from a screaming hot skillet, and inside it is tender, tight, with real CRUMB. Tough men, lumberjacks, guys who haven't cried since 1987, they eat my cornbread and they WEEP. Into the cornbread. The salt from the tears actually adds something. Hand on heart.

The secret — and I am giving this to you for free, no popup, no newsletter signup, no cookie banner asking if 247 unnamed partners can please sell your data to a hedge fund, what is happening to the internet, sad — the secret is bacon fat. Bacon fat in the skillet. You preheat that cast iron in the oven until it is SMOKING, you drop a spoon of bacon fat in there, the fat SCREAMS, the kitchen panics, and then you pour cold batter onto hot grease and the whole pan hisses like an angry cat. That hiss is the sound of victory. Take my word for it.

This is the cornbread that ends arguments. You bring this to a barbecue, the barbecue is over — not the eating, the eating intensifies — but the COMPETITION is over, somebody else brought their sad little sugar cake, they're sweating, they're hiding it under a napkin, they're trying to slide it back into the trunk of their car. Let them. We don't gloat. We just eat. We eat the better cornbread. We eat it with cold butter. We eat it with chili. We eat it standing over the sink at midnight because we could not sleep knowing it was in the kitchen. Save me a piece.