Cornbread

Cornbread is a quick bread made with cornmeal, associated with the cuisine of the Southern United States, with origins in Native American cuisine. It is an example of batter bread. Dumplings and pancakes made with finely ground cornmeal are staple foods of the Hopi people in Arizona. The Hidatsa people of the Upper Midwest call baked cornbread naktsi. Cherokee and Seneca tribes enrich the basic batter, adding chestnuts, sunflower seeds, apples, or berries, and sometimes combine it with beans or potatoes. Modern versions of cornbread are usually leavened by baking powder. Native people in the Americas began using corn and ground corn as food thousands of years before Europeans arrived in the New World. First domesticated in Mexico around six thousand years ago, corn was introduced to what is now the United States between three thousand and one thousand years ago. Native cooks developed a number of recipes based on corn, including cornbread, that were later adopted by European settlers and enslaved African people—especially those who lived in Southern colonies. Aside from eating corn on the cob, Native people also mixed corn kernels with lye to produce hominy through an ancient process called nixtamalization. Both hominy and unprocessed corn were then ground up to varying degrees to make dishes like sofkee (a corn-based soup or drink) and grits or to make cornflour. Frequently, cornflour was, and continues to be, used to make various cornbreads, like corn or ash pone, tamales, arepas, and tortillas. In contrast, cornmeal tends to be coarser than cornflour and is produced by grinding dry, raw corn grains. Besides cornbread, Native people also used cornmeal and hominy to make grits and alcoholic beverages, such as the Andean chicha.

Source: Wikipedia