Posted by Adam Kuban, April 9, 2008 at 1:45 PM
Continuing this week's Cook the Book series, today's highlighted recipe from Crescent Dragonwagon's Cornbread Gospels is for Craig Claiborne's Sunflower, Mississippi, Spoonbread. A book dedicated to cornbread would be nothing without a section on spoonbreads, and, of course, Dragonwagon delivers.
Basically a mush of either white or yellow cornmeal lightened with eggs and then baked, spoonbread, Dragonwagon says, is "the apotheosis of cornbread." The spoon in the dish's name is sometimes said to come courtesy of the fact that you spoon it from the baking vessel onto the plate, but Dragonwagon found citations that state the name may have come from the word suppawn, a Native American word for "porridge." Either way, it's seriously good stuff.
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As is always the case with our Cook the Books, we're giving away a five copies of this book this week. Enter to win here »
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Posted by Adam Kuban, April 9, 2008 at 9:00 AM
The following recipe is from the April 9 edition of our weekly recipe newsletter. To receive this newsletter in your inbox, sign up here!
One of the best cornbreads I've ever had was a friend's great-grandmother's cornbread, in which she mixed in some creamed corn to make the dish extra moist. This recipe, from Crescent Dragonwagon's The Cornbread Gospels, does the same. She developed it for her neighbor (the titular Carroll), who was having a little trouble with it as originally written. Try it split and toasted with butter and maple syrup.
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Posted by Adam Kuban, April 8, 2008 at 5:00 PM
Yesterday we highlighted a Southern cornbread, so today I think it's only fair we make a bit of a deal about a Northern cornbread. Crescent Dragonwagon, the author of The Cornbread Gospels, says that this cornbread is sweet (as you'd expect), but not too sweet and that it rises high, so expect to see a little dome in the middle.
Win 'The Cornbread Gospels'
As is always the case with our Cook the Books, we're giving away a five copies of this book this week. Enter to win here »
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Posted by Adam Kuban, April 7, 2008 at 4:00 PM
The first of our cornbread recipes this week is for a Southern cornbread. Crescent Dragonwagon, the book's author, has helpfully broken up The Cornbread Gospels into regional divisions, explaining the differences among them. There are too many to go into here, suffice it to say that this cornbread should do you right no matter where you live. It's a recipe adapted from Sook Faulk, whose niece Marie Rudisill was Truman Capote's aunt. Faulk reportedly gave the recipe to Rudisill "with the understanding that [she] would share them with Truman Capote, [her] sister's child, who had been brought up in Sook's hometown, Monroe, Alabama."
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Posted by Ed Levine, April 6, 2008 at 12:00 PM
This week's Cartoon Kitchen features Serious Eats' cartoonist in residence Larry Gonick's spin on an old clam dish. —Ed Levine
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Posted by Lucy Baker, November 15, 2007 at 3:00 PM
As a child, every year a few days before Thanksgiving we had a Simple Meal. The meal was meant to replicate the humble nature of the first Thanksgiving, and—in a world where there is so much hunger—remind us of all we have to be grateful for. It consisted of bowls of homemade chicken soup with rice, carrots, and celery; cups of fresh New England apple cider; and my favorite: crumbly squares of warm cornbread with fat pats of butter melting on their tops.
To this day, cornbread is one of the things I look forward to most at Thanksgiving.
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Posted by The Serious Eats Team, November 14, 2007 at 8:00 AM
When we talked to Bon Appétit editor in chief Barbara Fairchild about the November 2007 issue of the magazine, we asked her what her favorite Thanksgiving recipes from the issue were. These muffins, published here courtesy of Fairchild and Bon Appétit, were among them.
This recipe is fun, Fairchild says, "because everyone gets their own little cornbread muffins. I bet it would even work with a cornbread mix, though we never tested the recipe using a mix."
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Posted by Ed Levine, June 7, 2007 at 5:15 PM
A great side dish is almost as good as the 'cue itself. Almost.
But if you don't have sides, you feel as if something's missing. Carolyn McLemore's Cornbread Salad has a little something of everything in it, however. The recipe, after the jump.
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