I’ve always said that, if a Southerner put sugar in their cornbread, then there’s sugar in Southern cornbread. If a Southerner didn’t put sugar in their cornbread, then there’s no sugar in Southern cornbread.
A lot of people are emotionally invested in this question. Asking it is a quick way to start a fight in our Facebook food group.
Ask that question, and kitchen knives will be drawn. There will be hurt feelings and somebody may end up in the hospital. It’s serious business.
Most of the time, people’s answer to that question boils down to how grandma used to make it.
Many fail to recognize that there was more than one grandma in the South, and most likely, they all made it differently. Sometimes they had many different cornbread recipes on their index cards.
I decided to dig into this question to figure out how people traditionally made cornbread in the South. Especially in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
- Try my Southern-style cornbread recipe.
Combing Through Historical Cookbooks
I figured the best, and potentially the only, way to answer this question was to go through some old cookbooks and see what they had to say on the subject at the time.
Six Cookbooks ought to cover it. Below I’ve summarized my findings from one cookbook that covers all of the South, one from North Carolina, two from Kentucky, and two from Louisiana. These cookbooks ranged in publication date from 1867 to 1904.
That ought to give us a broad look at the entirety of the South.
The Dixie Cookbook
The first cookbook that I dug into was the Dixie Cookbook. I found a revised version from 1885 on Archive.org.
On its title page, the Dixie Cookbook states the following: “From the treasured family collection of many generations of noted housekeepers: largely supplemented by tested recipes of the more modern Southern dishes, constructed by well-known ladies of the South.“
I found this book to be a treasure trove of information and very telling of how cornbread was cooked at the time.
It had seven different cornbread recipes in it (p. 28 and 29):
- “Mrs. B.’s Corn Bread” – 1 tbsp. sugar
- “Boiled Corn Bread” – half a pint of molasses
- “Corn Bread” – 1/2 cup of sugar
- “Corn Bread” – 1 tbsp. sugar
- “The Bread of Our Forefathers” – no sugar
- “Plain Corn Bread” – sugar optional
- “Steamed Corn Bread” – 2/3 cup of molasses
As you can see, only one omits sugar, and one makes it optional. The other five recipes explicitly call for sugar.
Dixie Cookery
The next cookbook I looked at, Dixie Cookery, was a little older, being published in 1867. The author of this cookbook was Mrs. Barringer of North Carolina, so we know these recipes were not from the deep South.
It included five different recipes for cornbread (p. 50 and 51):
- “Rice-Corn Muffins” – no sugar
- “Very Fine Corn Muffins” – no sugar
- “St. Charles Bread” – no sugar
- “Light Corn Bread” – no sugar
- “Corn Meal or Flour Crisp” – no sugar
So, now we have one cookbook with no sugar in their cornbread. It’s a little older than the Dixie Cookbook, but the author wasn’t from the deep South.
The Blue Grass Cookbook
This cookbook is a little newer than the previous two, being copyrighted in 1904. Being called the Blue Grass Cook Book, we assume that the recipes originate from Northern Kentucky.
This cookbook includes eleven different breads using cornmeal (p. 7 to 12):
- “Batter Bread” – no sugar
- “Kentucky Batter Bread” – no sugar
- “Soft Batter Bread” – no sugar
- “Marcellus’s Corn Muffins (No. 1)” – no sugar
- “Corn Muffins (No. 2)” – no sugar
- “Marcellus’s Corn-Meal Batter Cakes” – no sugar
- “Egg Bread” – no sugar
- “Johnnie Cake” – no sugar
- “Kentucky Corn Dodgers” – no sugar
- “Corn Dodgers” – no sugar
- “Spoon Corn Bread” – no sugar
So, we have another older cookbook with no sugar in their cornbread.
The Creole Cookery Book
With this book, we’re heading way South, all the way to New Orleans, Louisiana. Like the Dixie Cookbook, The Creole Cookery Book was also published in 1885.
This book has seventeen different cornmeal-based breads (p. 82-84):
- “Cornmeal Muffins” – no sugar
- “Corn Bread” – no sugar
- “Sweet Journey Cake” – 2 spoonfuls of brown sugar
- “Corn Bread Rusk” – 2 cups molasses
- “Corn Bread” – no sugar
- “Corn Cake” – 1 cup molasses
- “Potato Corn Bread” – 1 lb. of brown sugar
- “Sweet Corn Bread” – 1/2 pint molasses
- “Corn Wafers” – no sugar
- “Batter Bread” – no sugar
- “Cornmeal Rusk” – 2 cups molasses
- “Risen Corn Cake” – no sugar
- “Cornmeal Bread” – no sugar
- “Corn Bread” – no sugar
- “Cornmeal Bread” – no sugar
- “Virginia Corn Cake” – 1 tablespoon of sugar
- “Virginia Cakes” – no sugar
Out of seventeen different cornmeal-based bread recipes, ten didn’t have sugar in them—slightly more than half.
Cooking in Old Creole Days
Another cookbook from the New Orleans region, this one is a bit newer with a publication date of 1903
Cooking in Old Creole Days has eight different cornmeal-based bread recipes (p. 52-55):
- “Aunt Anne’s Corn Bread-Without Powder” – no sugar
- “Aunt Anne’s Delicious Corn Bread” – good pinch of sugar
- “Aunt Anne’s Hoecake” – no sugar
- “Corn Pone” – no sugar
- “Corn Bread” – no sugar
- “Corn Cake” – brown sugar
- “Cornmeal Bread” – no sugar
- “Couche Couche” – sweeten it with sugar
Out of the eight recipes in this cookbook, five have no sugar.
Housekeeping in the Blue Grass
Here’s another Northern Kentucky cookbook, but this one is almost thirty years older than the other (published in 1875).
This cookbook has seven different cornmeal-based bread recipes (p. 49-57):
- “Corn-Meal Muffins” – no sugar
- “Corn Muffins” – no sugar
- “Corn Meal Batter Cakes” – no sugar
- “Flannel Cakes” – no sugar
- “Rice Corn-Meal Bread” – no sugar
- “Kentucky Corn Egg-Bread” – no sugar
- “Old Fashioned Corn Dodgers” – no sugar
In this old Louisiana cookbook, there are nine different cornmeal-based recipes, and none call for sugar.
So, What Did We Figure Out With This Tedious Exercise?
Out of 6 historical Southern cookbooks containing 48 different cornmeal-based bread recipes, 16 recipes include sugar and 32 don’t.
There are twice as many cornbread recipes that don’t include sugar.
That doesn’t mean that cornbread doesn’t include sugar; it just means that more often than not, Southern cornbread doesn’t have sugar in it.
So, back to what I said above, “if a Southerner put sugar in their cornbread, then there’s sugar in Southern cornbread. If a Southerner didn’t put sugar in their cornbread, then there’s no sugar in Southern cornbread.”
Maybe, way back then, everybody was yelling at each other about sugar in cornbread, but I doubt it.
It looks like they were just more versatile cooks with a tremendous number of cornbread recipes to pick from.
No wonder everybody fights over it so much. They only have one recipe.
Leave a Reply