Quote:
Originally Posted by koland
Often called Johnnycakes, as well. Theoretically, you could cook them on your hoe, placed in a fire, while out in the field. Made with corn, of course, otherwise they are just pancakes. An even poorer version of daily bread than cornbread, which required a pan....
hmm... now I want to go cook some cornbread...
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That information about cooking cornbread on a hoe is fascinating--I had never heard about it before. I hope that the workers out in the field washed the hoe up at least a little bit before the cooking began. It would be clean (bacteria free) dirt by the time that they got through, but the grit would be extremely hard on the teeth (some ancient people and more recent, but technologically-backward, people often had bad, worn-down teeth from eating foods made from wheat and corn because of the stone tools/implements that were used for grinding those grains). But, then, where would they have gotten the water (not even considering
clean water) to wash it at all, not even thinking about it being washed
like it needed to be washed? Being Merciful, I won't go any further with that line of thought. ha.
Johnnycakes sounds a little bit more familiar, but still not very. I'm racking my brain trying to remember if my (Knoxville-area) grandmother ever cooked cornbread that way, and I'm just not remembering that she did. Seems like she always used a skillet, which my Mom, following her example, almost always used, too. Mom is almost 80 years old, but she still has a sharp mind, so I'm going to talk to her and she what she remembers.
The areas of my sojourning in the deep South in which I remember seeing flat, pancake-like cornbread the most (it was almost, if not completely, ubiquitous in these places, in fact) were northeast Mississippi and east central Alabama. If you ordered "cornbread" in a restaurant there, you were going to get pancake-style. Right after I moved to the first one of those two places, and I saw pieces of pancake-style cornbread for the first time or two, I thought that they
were pancakes--I had never, or extremely rarely at least, seen cornbread like that!
A quick, tangential thing about cornbread in a restaurant. The tendency to go pancake-style in them probably had a lot to do with practicality, too. The skillet-cooked cornbread, with its pie-like pieces and often crumbly sides, did not lend itself well to being served aesthetically. Thoughts?
A good (I didn't say "great." ha.) compromise in the skillet vs griddle style situation is one that I see some around here where I live now (north central Florida). It is sheet-cake/brownie-style, where the cornbread mix is poured into a rectangular cake pan, cooked, and then sliced into square-ish pieces before serving.
Common around here, too, is preparing cornbread muffin-style. Maybe it's common, too, in central Tennessee, because the central/north-central-Tennessee-based (Lebanon, Tennessee) chain Cracker Barrel serves it muffin style. However, south of there about 60-70 was a well-known restaurant which served it skillet-style.