How other people see me

As if having you all and Mom see me as a neurotic nebbish and a middle-aged librarian wasn't bad enough, Mom rolled this story out at the dinner table the other day: During a Wegmans run we made together in the first days of the quarantine, Mom and I ran across one of her work colleagues. When they spoke recently, Mom's co-worker remarked that she hadn't seen Mom since that time at Wegmans when Mom was shopping with her father. That's worse than the Trader Joe's employees letting me in before 9:00 a.m., which is the time currently reserved for the over-60 crowd, though not as bad as being mistaken for Cassie's grandmother. I guess it really is time to dye my hair, or what's left of it, anyway.

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For years, the cornbread I've been making, primarily to accompany Black Bean Umami Chili, is a dense, southern-style cornbread, with a high corn-to-flour ratio (>70% cornmeal) and light on the sugar (only one tablespoon, which is optional). It wasn't always so. We used to make our "cornbread" from a recipe that contained, among other things, 2 cups of Bisquick™ Original Pancake & Baking Mix, ¾ cup of sugar, and only 2 heaping tablespoons of cornmeal. The sweetness and the Bisquick ingredient list [1], in addition to the scorn of my buddy Ed, eventually turned me off, but I think Mom always mourned the loss of that particular "cornbread."

When I was researching flourless peanut butter cookies, I came across a website that conducted a pretty thorough bake off for peanut butter cookies using popular internet recipes. [2] I explored the site and found a sweet cornbread bake off that intrigued me, because the distinct winner was passingly similar to our old Bisquick recipe, but with four times as much cornmeal and a little bit less sugar, as well as a combination of oil and melted butter for texture and flavor. Plus, it's ridiculously easy to throw together in just one bowl.

Happily, the results were as advertised, and we all really enjoyed the bread, which is moist and fluffy, even if it is more on the cakey side as cornbreads go. I thought ⅔ cup of sugar would be way too much for me, but it seemed just right once I got used to it. And the notes to the recipe say you can decrease the sugar to ⅓ cup if you want a less sweet cornbread that still works. For me, I'll probably stick with the full amount as an occasional alternative to our usual dense, heavy on the cornmeal, nearly unsweetened cornbread.

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[1] Enriched Flour Bleached (wheat flour, niacin, iron, thiamin mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid), Vegetable Oil (palm canola and/or soybean oil), Corn Starch, Dextrose, Leavening (baking soda, sodium aluminum phosphate, monocalcium phosphate), Salt, Sugar, DATEM [diacetyl tartaric acid ester of mono- and diglycerides], Monoglycerides.

[2] The Ovenly cookies that were roundly defeated by Alton Brown's in our family taste test finished second overall in the bake off.

Sweet Cornbread

Adapted from Mel Gunnell via Mel’s Kitchen Café

Time: 45 minutes (only 12 minutes active)

I used 100% all-purpose flour, Quaker Yellow Corn Meal, the full amount of sugar, whole cow’s milk, and sunflower oil. In the notes and comments on the original recipe, Mel says you can: replace 50 to 75% of the all-purpose flour with white whole wheat flour; decrease the sugar to as little as ⅓ cup (66 grams); replace the milk with buttermilk (adding ¼ teaspoon of baking soda if you do); and use any kind of oil, including avocado, vegetable, or melted coconut. A few commenters said they had successfully substituted almond milk for dairy milk.

Dry ingredients
210 grams (1¾ cups) all-purpose flour (see note)
133 grams (⅔ cup) granulated white sugar (see note)
85 grams (~½ cup) yellow cornmeal (see note)
1 tablespoon (15 grams) baking powder
½ teaspoon fine sea salt

Wet ingredients
300 grams (1¼ cups) milk (see note)
2 large eggs (~57 grams each in the shell), lightly beaten
70 grams (⅓ cup) oil (see note)
42 grams (3 tablespoons) unsalted butter, melted

    1. Place a rack in the center of the oven; heat to 350 degrees. Spray an 8-inch square baking dish (I used a metal pan) with nonstick cooking spray.
    2. In a large bowl, whisk together the dry ingredients. Using a silicone spatula, stir in the wet ingredients until just combined. The batter will be thin.
    3. Scrape the batter into the prepared pan. Bake until a toothpick inserted into the center of the cornbread comes out clean, about 30 minutes. Transfer the pan to a wire rack to cool. Serve warm or at room temperature.