Homestyle Honey Cornbread

Homestyle Honey Cornbread

There are plenty of dinners when a pan of cornbread earns its place on the table. A pot of chili is simmering on the stove, soup needs something substantial alongside it, or supper is simply roast chicken, vegetables, and whatever can be pulled together before everyone gets hungry. Cornbread handles all of that very well.

This Homestyle Honey Cornbread is the version I make when I want it tender, buttery, and a little sweet. It has cornmeal for that familiar grainy texture, buttermilk and sour cream to keep the crumb moist, melted butter for richness, and honey for a mild sweetness. I also add corn kernels to the batter, which gives you little bites of actual corn throughout the bread.

It is especially good warm from the oven with butter melting into the top.

Cornbread has been part of American cooking for centuries, although the story begins long before there was an American South. Indigenous peoples throughout the Americas cultivated corn and developed many ways of grinding and cooking it. Smithsonian records of Pueblo cooking describe corn being ground for breads and combined with foods such as beans, squash, and pumpkin. The Southern Foodways Alliance also documents Native American preparations made from crushed green corn and from cornmeal mixed with water and fat.

As European settlers adapted to ingredients available in North America, cornmeal became increasingly important in colonial kitchens. By the eighteenth century, cornmeal cakes such as johnnycakes and hoecakes were established American foods. The National Park Service identifies johnnycakes as an eighteenth-century breakfast staple, usually cooked on a griddle.