Home » Food & Drink » Southern Cooking » Cornbread, Hoe Cakes and Hushpuppies

Cornbread, Hoe Cakes and Hushpuppies

© Lisa Casey Perry

Cornbread is the quintessential Dixieland side bread. Southerners serve it baked or fried, sweet and light or "corny" and spiced up with jalapenos. Old-timers will tell you that cornbread is best when soaking up "pot likker" or at the bottom of a cold glass of buttermilk. As for me, well I can eat it solo or with any old meal as long as it is slathered with butter!

Many recipes for cornbread call for buttermilk and it seems that not everybody has a carton in the fridge. For those of you who would like to try one of the following recipes that requires the addition of buttermilk here is a quick and reliable substitution: scant 1 cup milk + 1 tablespoon vinegar = 1 cup buttermilk. Allow vinegar to "sour" milk for 10 or 15 minutes before adding to recipe.

Lisa's Everyday "Jiffy Mix" Sweet Cornbread

I make this cornbread at least six times a month. It's quick, inexpensive and everyone always carries on about how it's just the best cornbread they've ever tasted. It goes with everything! This is probably made best by baking it in an iron skillet in the oven, however, I'm on an iron restricted diet so, call me crazy, but I don't cook in an iron skillet anymore. My bread turns out great in a greased, round cake pan.

Ingredients:

1 box "Jiffy" brand corn muffin mix

1 egg

1/3 cup of milk

1 Tbsp vegetable oil

1 heaping Tbsp sugar

Preheat oven to 400° and grease a round cake pan. Mix all ingredients together and blend quickly. Slightly lumpy is okay. Bake for about 20 minutes. Remove from oven and melt margarine or butter on top.

Hoe Cakes

This is a very old southern recipe for Hoe Cakes. I never knew exactly what "hoe cakes" were, so I never tried them. Since it is a "cornbread", I wanted to include the recipe. In the interest of "the writer should know a little something about the topic", I decided to give it a try. My observations follow:

* No matter how slowly I poured the cornmeal into the boiling water, it still clumped up. This did not turn out to be a problem because as the other ingredients were added and mixed in, the batter smoothed out.

* The skillet should be very hot and although the cornmeal is mostly cooked in the boiling water, a considerable amount of cooking goes on in the skillet. My cakes took about 10 minutes on each side. You'll get a feel for the doneness via your spatula. At first, the cakes feel heavy when you pat them out and put them in the skillet, but as they cook, they feel somewhat lighter-almost like a pancake.