Corn bread is bread. It’s eaten at the main course, not dessert.
Next you’ll be asking if strawberry shortcake is cake or biscuit.
I’ve put strawberries over both. 
Mmmm, sounds great. I’ll add that to my beans recipe. Need to make some Caribbean rice and peas soon too.
By this logic, a dolphin is a fish because it’s got fins and such and, well, swims with the fishes.
The “cake” in strawberry shortcake can be a cake— such as when it’s made from a batter and resembles angel food cake— or a biscuit, which I prefer. And biscuits are, as established above, breads.
Is it really as simple as batter=cake, dough=bread?
What about waffles? Are waffles cake?
What about beer-battered fries? Are they fries coated in cake?
Cookies are made from dough. Are they bread?
I’m not familiar with that. But if it goes through a batter phase, it’s cake, if a dough phase, bread.
There are things that genuinely blur the line. I mentioned biscuits up above, but cookies might be a better example. Before they are baked, some cookie batters can be runny, other cookie doughs can be form. A lot of them end up kind of wet and sticky, but pliable at the same time. Real tweeners.
That’s what I’m putting out there. If you have better criteria for making the distinction, I’m listening.
Waffles = cake. No question about it.
Beer batter on fries? That’s a noodler. I’d kinda put that in a different category, because it’s more of a accompaniment than an item all by itself. Nevertheless, by my criteria, it’d be cake. Sounds funny, I admit. But REALITY does have a sense of humor sometimes.
That’s the thing- a poolish like a biga or sourdough starter is what’s known as a pre-ferment. It typically consists of flour, water and yeast. *Poolish *is very wet and may have a batter-like consistency but as flour is added, it becomes more dough-like. So it’s both at different points.
I kind of like the batter/dough distinction- but I wouldn’t call it a phase. I’d say whichever it is just before baking determines cake or bread. Eliminates the problem with those breads that start out batter-like but become dough before being baked. Allthough you still have the biscuit/cookie problem.
actually ive only made cornbread from scratch once or twice and i used a USDA recipe that was printed on the surplus assistance bag …Most of the time mom used the Marie calendars mix that comes in the big yellow can …
The USDA recipe id love to know how someone came up with is the chocolate cookies made with cornmeal that was the other recipes on the bag…
There’s a whole class of batter breads out there, and if you google pix of them, and look and the recipes and taste the, I bet most if not all of you would identify that as bread rather than cake.
Here is my cornbread recipe, there is no sugar. This is bread. however, if you add sugar and go with 1:1 ratio cornmeal to flour, you can end up with something that is like cake. An example of this is the corn muffins that Boston Market serves.
2 cups buttermilk
2 tbl oil
1 t salt
2 tbl baking powder
add 1 cup corn meal
1/2 cup flour
stir, repeat corn meal / flour ratio until thick
bake 400 degrees for 20/25 minutes
extra yummy, mix in finely chopped white onion
I wonder what y’all would make of makki di roti!
THANK YOU! I’ve never made a sandwich out of cornbread. Although I love both, mustard, ham and cornbread is just not right. Especially the sweet kind.
I voted both. It depends what you’re doing with it. I’ll butter it, unless I’m dipping it.
that looks almost like corn tortillas
Texture and function, mainly. Cornbread, unlike cake, has a thick, crumbly texture. Even the driest cakes seem to have a moisture that keeps it together. Cakes also function as a desert. So being to sweet, having desert ingredients like vanilla, etc.
The reason I said that this one mix was effectively cake is that it has the texture of cake, and had this sweet vanilla taste. If someone would have put icing on it, I could not have told it was supposed to have been cornbread.
I’ll admit it’s not the same sort of bread as the ones with those long gluten chains that hold it together and make it springy. It is a crumbly bread.
But it isn’t (normally) cake in the same way that muffins aren’t cupcakes.
You’re not wrong. But I would argue that different types of items require different sorting systems. Animals are more usefully classified by ancestry. It works better than other systems.
But food, I would argue, is best categorized in one of two ways: ingredients and function. You need the ingredients to know what you can make, or what you are consuming, and you need the function to know what you can replace with something else.
Breads and cakes not only mostly have ingredients in common, but actually have substantial crossover. There just isn’t a clear divide there. So I think using function to distinguish them makes the most sense.
That said, I do think there are some ingredient divisions. Hence my mention of vanilla in that cornbread mix.
For me, the distinction is mostly sugar. There are yeast breads and quick breads. It certainly isn’t whether you poured the batter or shaped the dough.
Tonight is the first night of Passover. We will be eating matzo. The bread of affliction. I’d you aren’t familiar with it, think a giant saltine without the salt. While there is some hand made matzoh that might have been rolled out (in less than 18 minutes after having been wetted) most commercial matzoh sure looks like it was poured. Matzoh is not cake. Really. NOT. CAKE.
Cake needs to be sweet and light and moist. It’s a much narrower category in my mind than bread. I’ll grant that I’ve had corn muffins that I might call cake. My corn bread has more wheat flour in it than the recipes of some of the purists. And I prefer yellow corn meal to white corn meal. But my corn bread has no sugar, and is drier than a cake. And my corn muffins have only a hint of sugar (and are baked in hot cast iron) and are crumbly and dry, not at all the texture of a cake.
As for cookies, they are their own thing, neither cake nor bread. They are sweet, but dry and crumbly. (Or even crisp.) Yeah, I know there are a lot of commerical cookies that are soft. They are on the cusp between cake and cookies. Brownies can also be cake-like or cookie-like. I prefer cookie-like brownies, but I seem to be in a minority.
As for what you’d use to make a sandwich:
First, that’s a functional question, like whether you eat it with the main course or for dessert.
Second, I rarely eat that sort of sandwich. If we are asking functional role, I care more about where in the meal it sits.
Third, there are lots of breads that aren’t well suited to a Dagwood sandwich.
Thanks! I learned something today.
I like the idea of using function as the basis for classification. You can develop and apply criteria out of that. And there certainly can be different classification systems for the same things, so that in one system cornbread is a cake, and in another it’s a bread. I’ll buy that. But then you can debate which system seems more “essential”. For me, a system based on dough vs batter seems to capture more of the essence, as those things are fundamental properties that won’t change, regardless of how different people may use/eat cornbread, or how different people might regard,say, cornbread with 1/2 cup sugar vs a cornbread with 2/3 cup sugar.
Continuing with the animal analogy, I’d argue that the batter-dough system is akin to using ancestry to classify animals (which as you say is a robust way of doing it), and a functional based system is more like categorizing animals based on their behaviors and habitats. Certainly a rationally based system, and utilitarian, but I think you would agree it is based on more superficial aspects of the animal rather than their essential nature.