When cookbook author Crescent Dragonwagon ran an inn and restaurant in Arkansas, her skillet-sizzled cornbread was a favorite menu item of hers and her customers. Clearly cornbread is important to her. After writing Dairy Hollow House Soup & Bread: A Country Inn Cookbook, she went on to write The Cornbread Gospels; she also likes to feed cornbread to her parrots. So I was prepared to take her cornbread making advice seriously, including her rationale for adding some sugar, at least a little, to the batter. Though I grew up mostly in the North, the cornbread I ate was prepared by my Tennessean grandmother, who had migrated north when she was a young woman. Her skillet cornbread was made with 100-percent cornmeal, making it a bit dry and crumbly, and was sugar-free. Grandma emphatically denounced cornbread made with sugar, and, until now, I too had made it without sugar.

Grandma would probably say “hogwash” on hearing (more…)