Sweet Cornbread ♥ Recipe

Slightly sweet and this batch, slightly blue with blue cornmeal

Today's recipe: A classic sweet cornbread made with stone-ground cornmeal, honey and cream. Delicious.

~recipe & photo updated 2011~
~more recently updated recipes~

2008: First off, lest anyone fear a diversion from this blog's recipe focus (vegetables, vegetables, vegetables!), who knew - who knew?! - that cornmeal is a vegetable, just field corn dried and ground. I'm embarrassed to admit: cornmeal's humble origin just never registered.

Luckily, despite the lapse, it turns out that a real cornbread lover can nose out another cornbread lover. Crescent Dragonwagon, cornbread lover extraordinaire (who else would write an entire cookbook expressing one's love for cornbread?) looked me up when the Country Cornbread recipe posted to help people use up their leftover ham from Easter. Just a couple of weeks earlier, I'd shared my recipe for cornbread (you know, the single go-to recipe we call our own), the savory ever-moist Skillet Cornbread, in Kitchen Parade, my food column. I didn't know I loved cornbread so much. But Crescent did -- she even offered to send a complimentary copy of her cookbook The Cornbread Gospels.

And she was so so right! There's just so much to love about cornbread. How cornbread can 'save' a skimpy supper. How mixing cornbread takes maybe 10 or 15 minutes. How cornbread emerges from the oven just 30 minutes later, steamy, substantial, ready for hungry folk to dig in. How cornbread is made, nearly always, from simple on-hand pantry ingredients. (I swear, The Cornbread Gospels uses the same ten ingredients again and again, turning out an astonishing variety of cornbread and racking up some 200+ recipes.) How cornbread's many variations are so different -- starting with southern savory cornbreads and their northern sweeter cousins. How cornbreads' names are familiar but old-fashioned, johnnycakes, hoecakes, hush puppies, spoonbread. Especially, I love how cornbread is so very American, the staple grain fundamental to Native Americans, later to this country's early settlers, and later still, for families in the southern states, especially, of the U.S.
Keep Reading ->>>