I found it’s pretty hard to screw up cornbread out of a box. How about the eggs? I found the more eggs the fluffier it is. I always put in at least one more than the recipe or box requires
I’m a corn bread newbie since it’s not very common here in the great white north. I’ve been playing around with soaking the corn meal in milk prior to mixing as it makes it fluffier and a little more cake like. Is that common down south or would it get me funny looks and mutterings of “that boy ain’t right”… However I do use a cast iron skillet so that should get me some cred, right?
Also my cornbread never rises much either. I’ll try some of the advice here.
Probably because you are soaking the cornmeal in milk beforehand. 
All that bubbly goodness that makes cornbread rise is liable to bubble right out during that process.
Eggs are what makes cornbread moist. Use them if you haven’t been.
It is not supposed to be fluffy or cakelike. It is supposed to be cornbread. And it is DEFINITELY not supposed to be sweet, just to cut you off at the pass there.
Just out of curiosity, do you buy pancake mix? You probably don’t, but pancakes are just like cornbread, in that people have been somehow convinced that they can’t make it without a mix, when making them from scratch is almost just as easy, requiring almost the same amount of ingredients and work. People like mixes because everything’s already in the right proportions and amounts, they just need to measure it.
Of course I don’t buy pancake mix. I have flour and salt and leaveners.
Yeah, it’s always perplexed me a little bit. I mean, pancakes from scratch are flour + eggs + milk + salt +leavener (and optional butter/shortening/oil and/or sugar). Pancakes from the box are mix + eggs + milk. There’s really not that much more work involved in making them from scatch, other than having baking powder and salt around. It’s not like pancake mix is “just add water.”
Well some are. I keep little plastic bottles of Bisquick pancake mix around. You just add water to the bottle, shake, and pour out pancake batter. They’re pretty ordinary pancakes, but you can wake up and make breakfast in a hurry. But white flour pancakes are pretty dull anyway. When my kids were still around we made pancakes every Sunday morning and tried out every variation, buckwheat, wholewheat, cornmeal, matzo meal, potatoes, yeast raised, egg white types, and then there’s all the things you can add, fruit, candy, bacon, nuts, and so on.
Of course there is a huge market for pancake mixes for people who don’t regularly keep flour+eggs+milk+salt+leavener around. People cook less and less and don’t tend to keep basic ingredients available, or even have a measuring cup around. Our grocery sells pre-made microwave pancakes. The people buying those probably consider using the mixes as ‘made from scratch’.
OK, that makes more sense to me. But the type I was most used to until I discovered that it’s really just flour and baking powder is the type where you need to add eggs and milk anyway.
Hey! Easy now. Thems fight’n words!
In case anybody is wondering; I used a preheated cast iron skillet, threw in a pinch of BP and mixed it way less. (BTW, NOT mixing it until all the lumps were out was very hard on my OCD.)
I had much better results. Thanks for your help guys.
Agreed, cornbread needs a little sweetness. It’s a Southern tradition.
Not cake or candy sweet. Just a little sweet.
Same way that I like ice tea. A touch of sweetness please. 
I thought sugar, at least in the case of cornbread (as opposed to iced tea), was a Yankee thing. Do I have it backwards?
No, you don’t. Cornbread shouldn’t have sugar in it. Now, the cornmeal does have a corn taste, which is a teeny bit sweet, but sugar is an abomination. I don’t know what the hell they’re doing down in Arkansas.
Not sugar, molasses.
Sugar (or syrup) in cornbread is an abomination unto Martha White.
And this attitude is why I use storebought cornbread. “Did you put any sugar in it?” No, I did not. “I just don’t know why it’s so much richer than mine.” You don’t say?
No, YOUR cornbread is supposed to be unsweetened. MY cornbread demands it. Feel free to not have any.
(I will never understand this attitude of, “That’s not how I do something, therefore it’s wrong.” One of my great joys is learning how other people do things that I do so that I can improve my own techniques and learn variations that will widen my knowledge base.)
Corn Zombie