The cornbread-’cue connection
On a recent visit to the Memorial-area location of The Brisket House, I found an unusual item on the menu: cornbread.
Cornbread is surprisingly hard to find on Texas barbecuejoint menus. For anyone who grew up in Texas or the southern U.S., cornbread was a constant presence on the family dining table or at local restaurants. My first memory of cornbread, beyond the ubiquitous box of Jiffy cornbread mix that appeared in our kitchen every Thanksgiving, was at the BlackEyed Pea restaurant in Beaumont, where I grew up in the early ’80s.
Long before it expanded to dozens of locations throughout the South (and eventually went bankrupt), the Black-Eyed Pea was a small Dallas-based chain that served some of the best chicken-fried steak, mashed potatoes, cornbread and iced tea (unsweetened) in the Lone Star State.
The moist, sweet cubes of cornbread arrived steaming hot and wrapped in a napkin. Slather on a pat of butter, and it was almost a meal unto itself.
There are few more controversial American foods than cornbread. If beans in chili is heresy in Texas, then sugar in cornbread is a big no-no in the American South. Though I grew up on a light, moist, sweet style of cornbread, traditional versions are more dense and savory.
Cornbread and its progenitor, known as corn pone, are two of the oldest dishes in American culinary history. Of course, corn and its processed variants — such as cornmeal — existed long before the arrival of Europeans in North America. Corn was a staple of the Native American diet for both people and animals.
After the arrival of Columbus, Europeans introduced wild pigs to the Americas. Corn and pork were two of the most plentiful ingredients in early American life and became the foundation for many Southern cooking traditions.
In a travelogue from 1853, “A Journey Through Texas,” New York-based writer and architect Frederick Law Olmsted lamented the ubiquity of cornbread as the main sustenance of Texas and the American South: “I made the first practical acquaintance with what shortly was to be the bane of my life, namely, cornbread and bacon.”
The dish he was referring to was probably closer to corn pone, a simpler, unleavened version of cornbread. It was made by mixing cornmeal, water and salt into a batter and frying that in a cast-iron skillet with leftover bacon grease. This association of corn and the South resulted in “cornpone” becoming a derogatory term for poor Southerners; staffers of the John F. Kennedy administration famously referred to Lyndon Johnson as “Uncle Cornpone.”
As pork-based barbecue became one of the defining dishes of the South, traditional cornbread came to be served with it. In Southern Living magazine, barbecue historian Robert Moss named cornbread as one of the top Southern barbecue side dishes, especially in Tennessee.
Moss describes a classic dish at Papa KayJoe’s barbecue restaurant in Centerville, Tenn., as pulled pork stacked on top of a corncake, also referred to as a hoecake or johnnycake.
Although pork-based barbecue certainly made the migration to Texas, cornbread never really caught on at local barbecue joints, possibly because of the prevalence of sliced white bread that became the standard accompaniment, especially in Central Texas.
At The Brisket House, the cornbread came out as the bright-yellow, moist cubes I remember from the old Black-Eyed Pea days. The sweet cornbread was a welcome accompaniment to pitmaster Wayne Kammerl’s superb, savory smoked meats.
Certainly, baking cornbread is a lot more work than throwing a slice of white bread on a threemeat plate. This may explain its absence from most Texas barbecue-joint menus. After all, you can’t wrap a slice of brisket, pickles and onions in a cube of cornbread.
Kammerl says the cornbread has been a popular choice among his customers since he added it to the menu. Maybe it’s time to reintroduce cornbread to Texas barbecue.