When he talks about beans and cornbread, he means something different than when I talk about beans and cornbread.
For me, “beans” means navy beans cooked with a hambone with a bit of tomato and/or onion in the broth (usually catsup, really) and “cornbread” means a sweet, almost cake like bread that’s baked.
For him, “beans” means pinto beans cooked in some manner that he can’t define and “cornbread” means slightly salty fried bread that resembles greasy pancakes.
I know how to make my kind of beans and cornbread, but not his (obviously inferior!) kind of beans and cornbread.
Hmm…I’m from Alabama, and to me, “beans and cornbread” means crusty buttermilk cornbread (baked, not fried, and savory. NEVER, EVER sweet.) split open and ladled with pinto beans slow-cooked with fatback (and perhaps a little onion.) Top liberally with hotter-than-hell pepper vinegar. Serve with sweet tea and sliced, fresh tomatoes, and perhaps some fresh cucumber slices.
My mother grew up on the Indiana/Kentucky border and her beans are like yours, minus the tomato. If I remember my grandmother’s cornbread correctly, it was not sweet, but it was baked.
There is fried mush, which is made from cornmeal, but it was served with syrup or molasses, not beans.
The cornbread needs to be cooked in a hot, cast iron skillet to be right. You get the skillet hot, put a little oil in it just to coat, dump the batter in, and then stick it in a pre-heated oven to cook. This gives it a semi-greasy, fried crust on the bottom.
I just use Martha White’s Gladiola Cornbread Mix, it’s close enough for me. There is a Corn Muffin Mix, but I think that’s sweeter.
Fried cornmeal is a johnnycake. Deep-fried cornmeal is a hushpuppy. Baked cormeal is cornbread - but it’s traditionally baked in a skittle (frying pan), which could be a source of confusion (?)
(to further confuse things, stewed cornmeal is mush, which can be left to set into a loaf, sliced and…fried! Come to think of it, you could bake the cornebread and fry it like French Toast, too)
Insane. If there was any meat to be had, you can bet yer bippy that it was included in the meal. It just so happened that most often, po’ folks just didn’t have any to serve. They’d try to get all th euse they could out of everything they had (by boiling bones into stock, cooking with marrow, and boiling beans with fat, etc.)
Yeah, you throw a ham hock in there for flavor and there’s not great chunks of meat, but lots of flavor and you can shread the ham hock off the bone to get some meat pieces. Like the joke about Pork-N-Beans, you don’t see any chunks of pork in those.
Pinto beans cooked with a ham hock or two and a goodly amount of black pepper; yellow cornbread baked in a preheated cast iron skillet with bacon grease in it. Sometimes northern beans the same way.
I looked up johnnycake and that looks about right, though not at all sweet. His grandmother fries them in shortening until the edges are translucent. I really dislike them.
My grandmother, who grew up in south Georgia, used to make fried cornbread: cornmeal and salt and water, probably fried in lard. She never called it anything but “fried cornbread”. It was wonderful, as long as you ate it while it was hot.
I usually make buttermilk cornbread baked in a skillet, not sweet at all, and eat it with black-eyed peas instead of beans.
Beans in our house are always pinto beans. I’m from California, but my dad was born in Oklahoma and his mother taught mine to make beans. We season our beans with a hambone (if we have it), which might deposit some meat in the beans, depending on how much ham was left on the bone. Or, lacking a hambone, we use a ham hock, which doesn’t leave much meat behind.
Our cornbread is baked in a skillet. We always used white cornmeal, never yellow, and made a standard cornbread recipe, but with only half the sugar it calls for. I’m not sure what recipe my grandmother used, but my mom always made hers with Bisquick, and so did I. Lately, though, we’ve found that the Martha White Cotton Country Cornbread mix is a very close substitute.
I’ve eaten fried johnny cake and don’t like it at all. Pinto beans and good cornbread, though (not too sweet) is excellent. Not that there’s anything wrong with navy beans. Or black eyed peas. Or butterbeans… I loves me some legumes.
Ogre speaks the Truth when it comes to beans and cornbread. This is supported by me, a life-long eater of beans and cornbread made by a Texan for a Kansan husband and California son.
We used to eat “hoe cakes” which I have seen referred to as hot water cornbread. Basically it is cornmeal mixed with salt ad hot water, shaped into patties and fried in a skillet. The story goes that the farm workers would make these in the field and cook them over fire on a hoe. Johnnycake - Wikipedia
Baked cornbread where I grew up was not sweet at all, while the batter was mixed, the cornbread pan (cast iron of course) preheated in the oven with a little bit of bacon drippings in the bottom. When the batter was poured in teh hot skillet caused the batter to cook then and form a bottom crust.
Beans can be either white beans or pinto beans often cooked with a ham bone or a bit of fatback or bacon or lacking any of that a litte bacon drippings. My family also put a cayenne pepper in as well.
My Daddy still makes the best cornbread you ever ate even though he has cut back on oil and butter considerably. He has a real knack as well as a good recipe. Friends and neighbors are always asking him to fix some for potlucks so it isn’t just me.
Catsup? In beans? You must be insane to include that in any thread on this board. If you value your life, ask for this thread to be closed immediately, before the food nazis arrive!
I’m not scared. Hell, I grew up eating syrup on cornbread and cinnamon sugar in rice. Most soup beans around here are going to include tomato sauce or catsup. And it’s good.
Fried cornmeal mush is actually quite tasty served with butter & syrup and some bacon on the side. I wonder if you could do grits the same way? I can’t think of any reason why not – it’d probably be good. Maybe with sausage gravy on it?
My cornbread would probably not work well as French Toast. Too crumbly and coarse. I often crumble it into a glass of milk (yum!) and eat it – it crumbles so well, I think it would soften up too much in the milk and egg and never make it into the skillet to be French Toasted.
He prolly never knew that his mama cooked the beans with a hamhock, because he was in the den with the menfolks when it was happening. I’m sure there was one if there was a ham to hock, though.
Our cornbread is savory, never sweet, cast iron pan, etc. Beans would have a hock in them and could go either way, possibly ketchup sweet or salty savory.
I am the only one in this Bodoni household who will eat blackeye peas. So beans, in this house, are usually pinto, though occasionally Great Northern or navy beans.
I pick through the beans (2 pound pack) and soak them overnight. In the morning, I drain and rinse the beans and discard any floaters. I dump them into my round slow cooker, and set it on low. I add a mix of water and chicken broth. I dice up a ham steak (with bone) and add it. The steak costs about as much as a ham hock, and has far more meat on it. I dice up an onion and put that in, too. Sometimes I add some chopped celery (no more than one rib, though). My husband doesn’t really care for celery in his beans, so I usually don’t put it in.
For cornbread, I either use a Jiffy mix or whatever recipe is on the back of the cornmeal package. I like sweet cornbread, FTR. I prefer to make corn muffins. I don’t use a cast iron skillet, so I don’t make cornbread in one. To redeem my Southern cooking credentials, I DO save my bacon grease and use it in cooking…and I put the bacon grease in cornbread.
A little off topic, try frying up some potatoes in bacon grease. Your cardiologist will hate you, but your taste buds will love you. Also, I don’t put any tomato products in my beans, but I DO put a small can of V8 (original flavor) in my soups and stews, just before serving. It gives the soup a little nutrition and flavor boost.
If there was any meat to be had, you can bet yer bippy that it was included in the meal. It just so happened that most often, po’ folks just didn’t have any to serve. They’d try to get all th euse they could out of everything they had (by boiling bones into stock, cooking with marrow, and boiling beans with fat, etc.)