From Garden and Gun magazine:
Q: Is there a “right” way to make cornbread? In other words, sugar or no sugar?
This is a family magazine, and it’s the Food Issue, so I’ll try to be diplomatic here—which may not work: The addition of sugar to this centuries-old bread is a mark of low character. The color of the cornmeal matters somewhat less, but white is preferred. I won’t say that adding sugar to the recipe was a vast national conspiracy to undermine the South’s obvious culinary supremacy in America—although I suspect it was—but it was a ferocious attack on a fundament of Southern cuisine, if not upon the region itself. So that you can understand the enemy and combat him properly, allow me to explain that the Cornbread Wars are quite insidious, because every nutball with an oven and a sack of meal insists on messing with perfection. When French and English Southerners learned from the Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, and Cherokee cooks in the seventeenth century that corn could yield a fine meal for breads and stuffings, there was no sugar in the recipe, or anywhere near this grain. Why on earth would there have been? There’s enough sugar in the grain—that’s why they can make liquor out of it. What the masterly American Indian cooks knew about cornbread was that, correctly done, it bore a delightfully tangy bitterness. Do you want sugar wrecking all that fine chemistry? Tragically, sugar has wormed its way into Southern kitchens, so now you’re in as much danger at home as you are abroad of having to eat an unfortunate pastry masquerading as cornbread. What you should do after such an encounter is bake up a batch of real cornbread in a properly greased iron skillet, mash some up in a glass of cold buttermilk, and eat that with a spoon. Then you will be bitterly and properly buttressed as a Southerner.
Q: Is there a “right” way to make cornbread? In other words, sugar or no sugar?
This is a family magazine, and it’s the Food Issue, so I’ll try to be diplomatic here—which may not work: The addition of sugar to this centuries-old bread is a mark of low character. The color of the cornmeal matters somewhat less, but white is preferred. I won’t say that adding sugar to the recipe was a vast national conspiracy to undermine the South’s obvious culinary supremacy in America—although I suspect it was—but it was a ferocious attack on a fundament of Southern cuisine, if not upon the region itself. So that you can understand the enemy and combat him properly, allow me to explain that the Cornbread Wars are quite insidious, because every nutball with an oven and a sack of meal insists on messing with perfection. When French and English Southerners learned from the Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, and Cherokee cooks in the seventeenth century that corn could yield a fine meal for breads and stuffings, there was no sugar in the recipe, or anywhere near this grain. Why on earth would there have been? There’s enough sugar in the grain—that’s why they can make liquor out of it. What the masterly American Indian cooks knew about cornbread was that, correctly done, it bore a delightfully tangy bitterness. Do you want sugar wrecking all that fine chemistry? Tragically, sugar has wormed its way into Southern kitchens, so now you’re in as much danger at home as you are abroad of having to eat an unfortunate pastry masquerading as cornbread. What you should do after such an encounter is bake up a batch of real cornbread in a properly greased iron skillet, mash some up in a glass of cold buttermilk, and eat that with a spoon. Then you will be bitterly and properly buttressed as a Southerner.
