This quick and easy bread goes perfectly with soup, chili, or just your tongue. It’s the first bread I ever baked and disabused me of the notion that I couldn’t bake.

1 cup flour
1 cup yellow cornmeal
1 tbsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
2 eggs, beaten
1 cup milk
1/4 cup melted butter
1/4 cup honey
1/4 to 1/3 cup sugar

Preheat your oven to 400 degrees F. If you set your oven to 400 degrees C your aluminum pan will melt and the cornbread will make your fillings hurt.

Mix the flour, cornmeal, baking powder and salt in a big bowl. You can sift them together if you wish. I never have and it comes out great every time.

Whip the milk, eggs, butter, honey and sugar in a seperate bowl or shake in a quart bottle. I like shaking them in a bottle because it counts as exercise.

Hose down a baking pan with a sprayable oil or grease it up with butter or shortening. I use a 9 x 13 inch pyrex glass pan though if you want to get all traditional you can go with the standard 9 x 9 inch pan. The larger one will give you 15 pieces whereas the smaller one gets you 9. Bacon fat works very well and adds extra yum along with bioavailable baconoids (the secret to the good life).

Dump the milky buttery goo in the bowl with the powdery things and mix until the ingredients are just wet. The batter will be lumpy and that’s a good thing ™. Don’t get carried away with the mixing. If mixed until perfectly smooth you end up with cornbrick. Still perfectly edible but it’s not everybody’s thing. If you do end up making cornbrick, have it for breakfast by putting a brick in a bowl, topping it with honey, pouring some warm milk over it and mashing it up.

Now pour the batter in yer pan and stick in in yer oven.
Let it go for 25-30 minutes or until a toothpick poked in the middle of the pan comes out clean and the edges start pulling away from the sides of the pan. I don’t do the toothpich thing anymore. I just wait until the top has turned a light golden brown and the edges pull.

Let it cool for 10 minutes and cut into as many pieces as you like.

This is a basic recipe to get you familiar with how simple it is to make cornbread. Lots of folks are intimidated by baking as it’s one of the few types of cooking that demands precision in measuring and manipulation in preparation. Cornbread defies the norm by being very forgiving of errors. Making and baking it is quite different than “normal” bread. It’s a liquid process in that you’re not cutting in your fat. There’s no rolling, punching, or rising required. Anyone can make cornbread with 99 and 44/100th’s of a percent success.

After you’ve made your first pan of it, get creative and add stuff to it when blending the wet and dry ingredients. Add some crumbled cooked bacon or minced ham or Spam.
A cup of corn niblets.
A cup of creamed corn.
A diced red or green bell pepper.
Minced onions.
Use maple syrup in place of the honey.
Throw in a teaspoon of finely chopped cilantro.
A few dashes of Tabasco sauce? Definitely.
Applesauce.
Cheese!
Sour cream? Yep.
Ricotta or cottage cheese.
A tablespoon of likker (brandy, moonshine, etc.).

Make up a pan of this to go with the split pea soup that I taught you to make in the previous post: Foxfur’s Split Pea Soup.

Split open a fresh warm piece of the bread, insert a thin piece of butter, top with honey, insert in mouth.

Make it, eat it, love it, share it.