It’s one of my pet peeves. As in a restaurant what their soups are and get “cream of mushroom, wedding, chicken noodle, and chili”. I always reply that chili isn’t a soup.
You people pick the weirdest battles. Which category should chili be under? Sandwiches? Salads? Seafood dishes?
Chili should be under “Soups/Stews.” But calling chili a soup doesn’t bother near as much as Chronos calling banana/zucchini bread “sweetbreads.” Dude, put a space in there, for all that is holy!
Where do you put Nachos Grande? The lack of a category doesn’t make it ok to call it soup.
Appetizers, obviously.
I would accept chili along with soup under starters. But if I ask the waiter what soups they have and they have chili they darn well better include it in the list!
Don’t forget, he made caul slaw.
Neither.
True bread is yeasted / raised and has a lot more structural integrity.
There’s a term “quick bread” which refers to something like this, raised with baking powder / baking soda. Think banana bread or date-nut bread. They have more in common with cake, chemically-speaking, but the texture is not at all like something I consider to be cake.
Cake is specifically designed as a dessert. Cornbread is not dessert.
Oh, for fuck’s sake. Cornbread is BREAD. I made a skillet of it last night to go with my soup beans.
White cornmeal, cream of tartar, baking soda, salt. One egg beaten into 3/4 cup of buttermilk (or a little yogurt or sour cream whacked with milk). Pour into a hot greased pan and bake at 425 for 20 minutes.
You can eat the leftovers reheated the next morning with butter and blackberry preserves, but that’s the closest sweet should ever get to it.
I voted “it can be either,” meaning depending on how it’s made. Proper corn bread is what I’d call “bread” (of the “quick bread” variety, as mentioned above.)
soup beans or bean soup? Enquiring minds want to know.
What is frosting if not sweetened aerated butter? Unless of course you’re talking about that readymade crap in the cardboard “can”. In that case, I repeat, what [TF] is [this so-called] “frosting?”.
The essence of this debate seems to boil down to the archetypal dispute between those rare few of us smart people who seek to find the essence of things, and all those other folks — bless their hearts!— who just seem to get distracted by the superficialities. Just because it’s got bread in the name, that don’t make it bread. Otherwise jellyfish would have fins and be made out of Concord grapes, and we’d all crave bacon made from Guinea pigs. Oh, but, you say, you eat cornbread in the same culinary contexts that you eat other bread, you say. That dog don’t hunt! Otherwise a horse (or a fish, if you’re Aquaman) would be a bicycle. No, cornbread’s a cake. Sorry to burst your bubble, or punch down your dough. In the same way, a cinnamon roll is, yep, you got it, bread Home Slice!
But even if you do want to prance around on the surface of things, riddle me this, cornbread-is-bread Einsteins: Would you ever make a sandwich— and I’m not talking about a little peanut butter and jelly— but a real Dagwood two-hander can’t-get-it-all-in-one-bite tower— out of cornbread?!?
Case closed.
It’s a shortbread, as Beckdawrek already pointed out.
Close. 1c cornmeal, 1 c flour, 1T baking powder, 1\4 t each sofa and salt, 1\4 c oil, 1-1/4 c buttermilk, and two eggs.
Soup beans are beans that are about to be introduced to greens and cornbread.
I voted “Depend son how it’s made.” I’ve had cornbread that was as sweet an some confections, and some that was more bread like with only a naturally sweet corn taste (no sugar added).
I make it with a 5-to-1 ratio of cornmeal to all-purpose flour. One and two-thirds cup cornmeal, one-third cup flour. Half plain milk and half buttermilk; half baking powder and half baking soda, and eggs. I give it one tablespoon of maple syrup for a slight touch of sweetness (but then I also use honey in my wheat & yeast bread).
Sometimes I like to add diced fresh jalapeños. Baking makes them translucent and they look like beautiful emeralds.
Proper cornbread is bread. But it’s all about context, I think…
I’m from a coastal-adjacent rural area of Georgia. Cornbread contains no sugar here, and is best made with a coarse meal of white corn, minimal flour, and in Granny’s iron skillet. (In a hot oven, or as a thinner layer on the stove, when it’s too hot to turn on the oven.) Or it’s made with just meal, a little salt, and water, and pan-fried for lacy cornbread. Best with a pot of greens, and/or beans, imho.
My stepdad is from West Virginia. He honestly thinks that Jiffy mix is cornbread, too. And I don’t mind an occasional Jiffy muffin. It’s a fine dessert. But he grew up on potatoes, which was a springtime luxury when I was a kid. (No root cellars around here, and potatoes will rot in the ground by about June, due to the temperature and or humidity.)
My suspicion is that, in places where milled wheat flour has been commonly available due to climate, “cornbread” was a novelty invented by dumping a couple of tablespoons of fine-ground yellow meal into some other quick bread recipe. And that’s fine for what it is. It’s not cornbread. (The closest comparison I can make is a Campbell’s soup recipe book from 1963, versus the beef Stroganoff recipe from The Joy of Cooking. If you squint, they appear similar enough I guess. But not really. And both are just a Eurocentric interpretation of common ingredients.)
I’m from a place where corn was the most available grain. Wheat just doesn’t grow well in SE Georgia. Rice is the second traditional starch here, and it’s terribly labor intensive. And, like everywhere since nomads settled down to farm, the cheapest grain was the traditional staple as a porridge for breakfast (grits,) an every meal bread, livestock feed, etc.
Sugar in cornbread is an abomination that shall not be tolerated. Those that do so are condemned to a special level of hell where a southern grandma continually beats them over the head with her big wooden stirring spoon for doing so. The Jiffy mix stuff is a corn muffin mix and is not in any way, shape, form, or fashion cornbread. Also, corn bread is baked in a well-seasoned cast iron skillet. It is acceptable to make cornbread muffin style but the pan should always be well-seasoned cast iron.
In summary, if I find out you put sugar in cornbread I WILL call your mama!
So, all the people who say cornbread is bread - explain. What criteria are you using?
For me, it’s got nothing to do with sweetness or when, how or with what else it’s eaten. It comes down the underlying substrate. Both bread and cake start out the same — fundamentally flour and liquid, +/- an infinitude of other stuff. To make a cake, the proportions of dry and wet are mixed to the consistency of a slurry, a batter, which is pourable. With bread, the dry and wet are mixed into a dough, which has a variable degree of elasticity, such that you can pick up the whole wad at once (try that with cornbread, or cake, batter).
This is where the divergence happens - batter vs dough. And that’s why cornbread is cake, because it goes through a batter phase. Not much question in my mind about it, really, at this point. Now, I’m comvicable to another point of view, but you breaders better come up with some good criteria.
If you were talking about biscuits, then I’d be more inclined to see some gray, as biscuits also go through a batter-like phase. But then by the time that gets rolled out and cut, it’s dough. So biscuits are bread. But that’s fodder for another thread.
Soup beans — pintos cooked with onion, garlic, and some variety of smoked pork (neckbones for me). AKA hobo beans or hillbilly beans. It’s just a very simple bean soup, usually dished up with greens and cornbread, like beegee said.
I never put wheat flour in my cornbread.
What’s your take on a poulish that slowly has flour added to it?