BY KATRINA MOORE
PHOTO BY FRED THOMPSON

It cozies up to collard greens and snuggles with soup. Honey seeps into it with a satisfying silkiness. It crumbles beautifully into beef stews and sits proudly next to fried chicken or barbecue. Butter loves it. (What doesn’t butter love?) Debates are held over its necessary ingredients; sugar or no sugar? Buttermilk, sour cream, or 2% milk?

Cornbread, that deceptively simple accompaniment to so many meals, is a staple in the southern diet. I grew up with the salty kind, rich with bacon fat and crisp from the preheated cast-iron pan my mother used. Northeasterners tend to like sugar in theirs, and I’ve found that some southerners do too, to the shock and chagrin of their peers. Midwesterners often sprinkle grated cheese on theirs and Southwesterners add jalapenos or green chilies.

Initially cornbread seems straightforward; essentially it is cornmeal, flour, a leavening agent, and a liquid. Cornbread’s origins are much deeper and more complicated than its ingredients, extending back to ancient Mesoamerica. Corn has been ground into meal for thousands of years, eventually becoming what we now call cornbread.

Corn has survived many milling processes, from the metate, or mortar and pestle, to the highly industrialized mechanical systems we have today. Native American women were the original corn grinders, often boiling the dry corn before pounding it with wood or stone implements. During the days of the “slab” grinder, or a wood box with a slab set at an angle, the Tewa Pueblos held corn dances. The men sang as the women ground to the rhythm, passing the corn from slab to slab until it was a fine flour. The dances and songs rose and fell in intensity and often continued for half a day or more until the work was finished. Grinding corn was considered a way of connecting to “the primal energy of life,” as Betty Fussell eloquently notes in her book The Story of Corn. After hand-grinding came the gristmill, a waterpowered stone grinder in which a sluice gate would be opened to push water over the wheel, turning the gears and thereby turning the millstones. Currently corn is milled and separated using complex systems of industrial equipment, and only 2% of the US corn crop is drymilled for human consumption; the rest is broken down into starches, syrups, and feed.

Before the Europeans brought wheat flour to the NewWorld, corn was the dominant grain. Cornbread’s origins are traced back to the Native American practice of making nokehick, an unleavened cornmeal pancake baked on a hot stone. Nokehick was misconstrued by the English as “no-cake” and eventually became “hoe-cake.”When the Europeans arrived, they were frustrated by corn’s unresponsiveness to yeast. To oversimplify a bit, they mixed their wheat flour with the cornmeal, added an ash alkali and an early version of baking soda known as “saleratos” for leavening, and cornbread as we know it was born.

That “hoe-cake” was so-called because much later on, as the story goes, American slaves would bake these cornmeal cakes on metal hoesin the fields.Wheat flour and leavening were reserved for the plantationowners in the form of yeast rolls and biscuits. The racial and economic divide extended to the cuisine as well as the language; corn pone, another word for a corn cake, became a derogatory term for rural simple-mindedness.

American regional variations of the food would come later: from the sweet Johnny cakes of Northern soldiers during the CivilWar to the introduction of exotic ingredients from Mexico in the Southwest. Cornbread has become a cultural icon in the South with its salty crumbles and warm, hearty sense of home. eP

Katrina Moore, a native southerner, attends culinary school in Seattle. When she’s not in school, she gives tours of an organic and fair trade bean-to-bar chocolate factory. More of her words and photos can be found at her blog, Cabbages and Kings, at tastecabbagesandkings.blogspot.com .