Sunday Supper Cornbread

1:54 p.m. Feb. 22, 2026

Let's talk about the bread that built the South.

Cornbread has been on Southern tables since before anyone alive can remember. It fed families through hard winters and lean harvests. It soaked up the soup at the bottom of a bowl of beans. It crumbled into cold buttermilk for supper when there wasn't much else. It has never asked for anything fancy in return. All it needs is a hot skillet, some good fat, and a cook with a heart for delicious cornbread.

Real Southern cornbread is not sweet. It is not cakey, nor does it come from a box. It is made from stone-ground cornmeal, mixed with a soft hand, poured into a screaming-hot, bacon-fat-greased cast-iron skillet, and baked until golden and crunchy on the outside, with a dense, savory crumb on the inside.

If that description already has your mouth watering, you're in the right place. If you're wondering where the sugar is, I promise we'll get there – but it’s a topic that I’m willing to stand my ground on.

The Sugar Question

We might as well address it now, because you'll hear it argued at every potluck, every church supper, and every family reunion all across the great state of Tennessee.

Northern cornbread has sugar in it. Some folks would call it cornbread cake, and they wouldn't be entirely wrong. It's soft, sweet, and perfectly fine if that's what you grew up eating. But in the South, sugar in cornbread is considered by many to be a fundamental misunderstanding of what cornbread is supposed to be.

Cornbread is a bread. It is meant to be a savory companion to the rest of the meal, not a dessert posing as a side dish. When you add sugar, you change its entire purpose. It starts competing with the beans instead of completing them. It clashes with the savory juices instead of soaking it up.

Now, I'll be honest with you: My family didn't put sugar in their cornbread, and it’s a tradition I have chosen to keep. But if your family has always done it that way and it makes people happy at your table, that is your kitchen and your call!

Premium Cornmeal Selection

If you want to make real cornbread, start by throwing out the finely milled, self-rising cornmeal mix that's been sitting in the back of your pantry for years. That stuff might get you by in a pinch, but it won't get you one of the finest pans of cornbread on your table.

What you want is stone-ground cornmeal. You want to avoid industrially processed options. The flavor difference is not subtle for a good reason. Stone-ground cornmeal tastes like corn. It is full of texture, has a unique character, and behaves differently in the pan, producing a crumb that is worth eating.

If you can source your cornmeal locally, do it. There are still small mills in Tennessee producing exceptional cornmeal, and buying from them means you're eating something made the way it was made here for generations.

As for self-rising versus plain: I prefer to use plain cornmeal and control my own leavening. One teaspoon of baking powder and a quarter teaspoon of baking soda per cup of cornmeal is all you need. This lets you adjust as needed and keeps you from being at the mercy of whatever ratios the mill decided to use that week.

The Skillet Is Not Optional

I said last week that you needed a cast-iron skillet for frying chicken. I'll say it again this week for cornbread, and I will keep saying it every week until every kitchen in Moore County has one seasoned and ready to go.

Cast iron retains heat like no modern bakeware can. When you pour your batter into a preheated cast-iron skillet coated with fat until it is nearly smoking, something remarkable happens: the batter hits the hot surface and immediately begins to set into a crust. That crust is the whole point. It is dark and crunchy, slightly salty from the fat, and what separates cornbread made in a cast-iron skillet from cornbread made in anything else.

A 10-inch skillet is the right size for a standard batch. Preheat it in a 450-degree oven for at least 10 minutes before you pour in your batter. The skillet should be hot enough that the fat smokes slightly when you coat the bottom.

The Fat That Gives It Flavor

Bacon drippings. Full stop.

Keep a jar of bacon drippings on your counter or in your refrigerator the way your grandparents did. Every time you fry bacon, pour the drippings into the jar and let it cool. That jar is liquid gold, and there is no better use for it than greasing a cornbread skillet.

The fat serves two purposes: it keeps the cornbread from sticking, and it flavors the bottom crust in a way that no vegetable oil or cooking spray ever will. When the batter hits that hot bacon fat, it absorbs just enough of that smoky, salty richness to make every bite of the crust taste like it was made by someone who has been doing this for 50 years.

If you don't have bacon drippings, lard is a perfectly honorable substitute. Butter will work but it burns more easily in a very hot skillet. Vegetable oil will get the job done, but won't give you the same depth of flavor. Stay completely away from cooking spray.

The Batter: Simple on Purpose

Good cornbread batter is not complicated, and that is entirely by design. The simplicity is the point. Here is what you’ll need:
• 2 cups stone-ground cornmeal
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 3/4 cups whole buttermilk
• 2 eggs, lightly beaten

Whisk the dry ingredients together. Make a well in the center and add the buttermilk and eggs. Stir just until everything comes together using a soft hand. Do not overbeat the batter. A few lumps are OK!

The batter should be thick but pourable, like a loose pancake batter. If it's stiff enough to hold a spoon upright, thin it with a splash more buttermilk. If it's watery, something went wrong with your measurements. Don’t try to adjust. Dump the bowl and start over!

The moment your batter is mixed, pull the skillet out of the oven, quickly and thoroughly coat it with your bacon drippings, and pour the batter straight in. It should sizzle. That sizzle means you did it right. Return the skillet to the oven immediately.

The Buttermilk Question

Every serious Southern cornbread recipe calls for buttermilk, and there's a reason for that. Buttermilk is acidic, which means it reacts with the baking soda in your batter to create lift. But more importantly, buttermilk contributes a tangy, slightly sour flavor that is essential to real Southern cornbread. It is part of what makes it savory and complex.

Use real, whole-fat buttermilk if you can find it. The low-fat versions work, but they're thinner and less flavorful. In a genuine emergency, you can make a substitute by adding a tablespoon of white vinegar or lemon juice to a cup of whole milk and letting it sit for five minutes. But if you know you're making cornbread on Sunday, buy the buttermilk on Saturday.

Time and Temperature

Bake at 450 degrees for 20 to 25 minutes. The oven needs to be preheated and hot. Cornbread baked at a lower temperature will cook through, but it won't develop the dark, crispy crust that makes this bread worth eating.

You'll know it's done when the top is golden brown and has pulled slightly away from the sides of the skillet. A toothpick inserted in the center should come out clean, or with just a few moist crumbs. The bottom crust, when you flip it onto a wire rack, should be a deep, burnished brown.

Let it cool in the skillet for five minutes, then turn it out onto a wire rack or a wooden cutting board. Cut it into wedges and serve it hot.

What Belongs Beside It

Cornbread doesn't need much company because it's already doing most of the work. But it doesn't live in isolation either. These are a few things I recommend pairing with your bread:

Pinto or soup beans
This is the classic Southern pairing. A pot of beans cooked low and slow with a ham hock, a bowl of cornbread on the side. The cornbread goes in the bowl, the beans go over it, and you eat it with a spoon. This is a meal. A full meal. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

Collard or turnip greens
Slow-cooked greens with their juices are what cornbread was born to soak up. The bitterness of the greens and the savory richness of the cornbread are one of the great food pairings in American cooking.

Chili
The Southern version of a chili supper almost always includes cornbread. It mops up the chili. It gives your hands something to do between bites. It makes the meal feel complete in a way that crackers never could.

Milk
Cold milk, poured over crumbled leftover cornbread in a glass. Some families do sweet milk; some do buttermilk. This is old-country food, eaten by generations who wasted nothing and found beauty in simplicity. If you've never tried it, make a batch of cornbread specifically to have it this way.

The Leftover Situation

Real Southern cornbread does not keep as long as packaged bread does. It is best the day it's made, ideally within an hour of leaving the oven. By the next morning, it will be drier and less crisp, though still perfectly usable for crumbling into beans or soaking in milk.

If you have leftover cornbread, wrap it tightly and store it at room temperature. I do not recommend storing in the refrigerator, which dries it out faster. Reheat it in a skillet with a little butter for about three minutes per side, and it will come back most of the way to its original self.

Leftover cornbread also makes excellent cornbread dressing around the holidays, which is a recipe for another Sunday entirely.

Why It Matters

There's a reason cornbread shows up at every significant meal in Southern life. It is not because it is easy, though it is. It is not because it is cheap, though it is. It is because cornbread is honest.

It doesn't pretend to be something it isn't. Cornbread doesn't dress itself up. It sits in that skillet, does exactly what it was always meant to do, and asks nothing of you except that you pay attention while you make it.

My grandparents kept their cornbread irons seasoned and ready. They sat on the back burner when they weren’t using it, and it moved to center stage at supper time. They made cornbread the way they did everything else in that kitchen: without fuss, without looking at a recipe, and with complete confidence that it would turn out the way it was supposed to because they had made it a thousand times before.

That's what we're building here, every Sunday. Not just recipes, but the kind of quiet knowledge that lives in your hands after you've made something enough times that you don't have to think about it anymore.

Start with the cornbread. You'll have it down in no time!

A Note on Cornmeal

Not all cornmeal is the same, and the difference matters more than you might expect. Most grocery-store cornmeal is degerminated, meaning the germ — the part of the kernel with the most flavor and natural oil — has been removed to extend shelf life. What's left is shelf-stable but comparatively bland.

Stone-ground cornmeal retains the germ and the hull, which gives it a fuller flavor, a coarser texture, and a shorter shelf life. Store stone-ground cornmeal in the freezer and use it within three months for best results.

White cornmeal is the traditional choice throughout the South, particularly in Appalachia and Tennessee. Yellow cornmeal is more common in the Midwest and produces a slightly sweeter, more assertive flavor. Both will make cornbread. White will make Southern cornbread.

Does your family put sugar in the cornbread? Do you use yellow cornmeal or white? Do you bake it in a skillet, a pan, or a cast-iron muffin tin? Every family has its own way, and every way tells a story about where they came from and who taught them. Email larder@mcobserver.news or message us on Facebook.

Next week: We're getting sweet on y’all. Be sure to check back for my advice on the best banana pudding!