Cornbread (Southern Skillet Cornbread)

Variations

• The hot pan is the dish. What your oven is doing adds one line to its section on preheating: "better still, preheat the tray inside it." Here that line becomes the whole recipe — not a warm tray but a skillet with fat in it, hot enough that batter sizzles. The surfaces that touch it fry instead of baking, and that is where the thin hard crust comes from.
• Heat control writes its rules for a hob and then moves them indoors — heat the dry pan, then add the oil; sound is your thermometer. Moved into the oven the same principle does a different job, and this skillet is the case that guide names for it. A pan preheated on the hob sears the outside of a piece of meat; a pan preheated in the oven fries the underside of a batter.
• It is also why nothing sticks. The batter sets on contact, so it never has time to soak into the iron. Poured into a cold pan it seeps in first and cooks second, and half of it stays behind.
• Corn has no gluten at all. The doughs dough and gluten lists under "doughs where you avoid gluten" — gamja jeon, tempura — are made with flour that could form gluten, and the skill is in not developing it. Cornmeal has no network to build in the first place. So the reason to stir this as little as possible is not toughness; it is protecting the gas the soda has already made.
• The soda and buttermilk are the reaction Irish soda bread explains. Acid meets base, carbon dioxide comes off, and the clock starts when they meet. The difference is that one is a dough and this is a pourable batter — so here you buy the time by having the pan hot before you mix.
• Whether sugar belongs in it is this bread's famous argument. The Southern version has none at all and goes savoury: buttermilk, bacon fat, cast iron, something to eat beside dinner and to soak in the pot liquor. The Northern one adds sugar and wheat flour and comes out moist and close to cake. They are less right-and-wrong than two different foods, and this recipe is the Southern one.
• Beside polenta, arepas and amiwo. All four are built on ground corn, but polenta is boiled in water, arepas are a masarepa dough griddled, and amiwo is stirred into sauce until it sets. This is the only one that is baked.
• Nixtamalisation. The treatment pozole explains — corn simmered in an alkaline solution — gives hominy, and hominy ground gives masa harina. Cornbread's cornmeal has not been through it, which is why the two cannot be swapped.
• What it goes with. Chili con carne and a pot of beans, or beside Texas brisket. Day-old pieces belong in a bowl of something wet, the way a clam chowder would take them.
• It stales fast. With no gluten network holding water, it is noticeably drier the day after it is baked. Slice what is left and fry it, or do what the South does and eat it in a glass of milk.

Tips

• No cast iron? Preheat a metal cake tin instead — the heavier the better. Not glass or ceramic: they heat slowly and can crack on that kind of temperature change (what your oven is doing).
• Bacon fat is the traditional choice and it genuinely tastes different. Butter burns at this temperature because of its milk solids, so use clarified butter or cut it half and half with oil.
• The grind matters. Medium is the default. Fine cornmeal makes a softer bread but loses the slight grittiness that is part of it, and masa harina is a nixtamalised different ingredient that will not make this bread.
• No buttermilk? 400ml milk with a tablespoon of vinegar or lemon juice, left ten minutes. The soda needs an acid to react with.
• Listen. If the batter goes in silently, it is worth putting the pan back to heat. Those five minutes decide the whole thing.
• Turn it out. Left in the skillet more than five minutes it steams underneath and the crust you worked for goes soft.
• The skewer has to come out clean. Cornmeal takes up water more slowly than flour, so a loaf that looks done on top and is still wet in the middle is a common way to get this wrong.