After all the heavy eating of the holidays I find myself wanting simple meals in weeks that follow. You know things like eggs and toast, grilled cheese sandwiches, and cornbread and milk.
I’m sure most of you are familiar with cornbread and milk, but just in case your not, the dish is crumbled cornbread in a glass with milk poured over it. Some folks prefer regular sweet milk and others like Granny and Pap prefer buttermilk.
Over the years more than a few folks have left comments about cornbread and milk here on the Blind Pig and The Acorn.
- Janet said: Of course, I like cornbread and milk together sprinkled with pepper. As someone else said, I also like to mash up saltine crackers in a cereal bowl and pour milk over them. It is delicious. And, we had potato cakes tonight made from left over mashed potatoes we ate last night.
- Kat remembered eating it with her Daddy when she was young and said she still likes to eat it.
- Farmchick said: I don’t like them mixed up together. I prefer my cornbread with a lot of melted butter between a nicely sliced layer! My Papa always had a big glass of cornbread with milk before he went to bed. It always seemed like so much to eat!
- Wanda in NoAla said cornbread and milk was a sure cure for the munchies.
- Norma said her grandfather thought the perfect Sunday night supper was to crumble cornbread into the biggest glass he could find, then pour in either homemade buttermilk or Borden’s buttermilk, which had big chunks of butter in it.
- Carlton GA Boy said: I grew up in a Cotton Mill town (Carrollton, GA) in the late 30’s and early 40’s. My parents and other kin worked different shifts and so most of the time we had fresh cow milk and left-over cornbread (from noon dinner) mixed in a glass for supper. Talk about being good, this combo would beat cornflakes any day of the week. Kids of today don’t know what good dishes they are missing.
- Trish said: Memaw introduced me to this as a little girl! always have some when I’m feeling down. Simple, but such a delicious treat!
- Frances Masuda said: Hi Tipper, I ate cornbread and milk when growing up, and I still like it, and eat it when I fix cornbread. Married for 50 years, and whenever I do it this, my husband still teases me. He doesn’t know what he’s missing!! Ha I like to eat it while warm with butter on it before putting in my glass of milk. Yummy!!!!!!!!
- Ken said: Tipper, That ole snuff glass filled with cornbread and milk sure brings a lot of memories back. I guess my grandma’s Bruten Snuff glasses is where we accumulated ours. But I enjoy cornbread crumbled and with milk poured over it or just a chunk broken off a cake and washed down with sweet or butter- milk. Kinda makes me happy, with the Blind Pig Gang playing in the background.
- Bill Dotson said: Tipper, I have ate cornbread and milk for as long as I can remember, I also like light bread and milk and soda crackers and milk. Years ago I started dicing up an onion in my bread and milk and crackers and milk. I guess you can tell I am rather fond of onions, I like them every way I can think of even on crackers and peanut butter, I may be weird in that way.
- Rachel said: We grew up with cornbread and milk. I prefer the sweet milk. It is a wonderful treat! Just crumble the bread in a glass or cup and then pour the milk on. I worked with a man years ago that ate milk and crackers the same way. I always said it sounded awful, but he convinced me to try it and it’s good too. Not as good as cornbread and milk though!
- B.Ruth said: Tipper, As I have posted before my Mom ate black walnuts in her cornbread and milk…if she had them… My husband likes his with buttermilk…as did my Mom and his Mom… We never ate cornbread n’ milk in a bowl ….always in a glass…and I’ll have mine with sweet milk please…never buttermilk…ewwww… Could I mention one more thing about make do meals… When we had mashed potatoes we always made enough to save for the next day…and we had the best potato cakes in the world…left a lot of time out on the stove for kids to grab for a snack…Thanks Tipper
- Don Casada said: Try putting a spoonful of sourwood honey in with your cornbread and milk, Tipper – I bet you’d like it then. Of course I’m pretty bad to like honey – especially sourwood – so I’d probably even like sheep sh** tea with some sourwood honey mixed in. By the way, if you’ve never done anything on sheep sh** tea – which was applied externally (as far as I know!!!) and similar remedies for skin ailments, you might want to look into it.
- Mike McLain said: One of my favorite things EVER. I love it with sweet milk, especially if the cornbread is made what I call the old southern way – corn meal, buttermilk, egg, and some melted bacon fat (oil works, too). My mom had an old corn stick pan (not the ones that make the cornbread look like an ear of corn). It made plain sticks about 8 inches long and roughly 3/4 inch diameter. I loved them because there was plenty of crust. I wish I could find a pan like that one. Mom’s got broken and after she died, it disappeared – my Dad probably just threw it away. Unfortunately, cornbread means extra weight, so I have to go easy on it, but it will always be one of my favorite treats, especially crumbled up in a glass of sweet milk.
I gave cornbread and milk a quick google and found this site that has some interesting tidbits about cornbread and milk.
If you need to know how to make a good cake of cornbread-you can see how we cook ours here.
Hope you’ll let me know if you like cornbread and milk!
Tipper
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One of my favorite snacks!!! I warm the cornbread, put it in the glass, and pour cold milk over it. Perfection!!
We never called it cornbread and milk. We called it ”CHUBBY” because if you ate a lot you would get chubby.
Grew up eating milk and cornbread,but always had an onion dipped in salt with the milk and bread,
I knew a family that crumbled their bread in a big bowl of fresh sweet milk and all ate out of the same bowl. That reminds me of a story a fellow I use to work with told me. When he was a boy,he spent a night with some friends and for breakfast they had possum. Him being the guest got the possum head. His mom never let him go back.
I’m late posting,but my old computer gave up the ghost.
I make my cornbread with buttermilk, so… Of course, it’s rare to have “left-over” cornbread, but this year after our New Years Day black-eyed peas, collards, and cornbread, I found we had a little cornbread left. I foresee a comforting meal coming.
So happy to read that Mike McClain found his Mom’s pan! Would love to see a picture of it. Maybe even a before-and-after, since Mike says he’ll have to de-grunge it! If it is Pyrex, I highly recommend running it through the toughest cycle of a dishwasher – my Grammie’s pie plates came out sparkling, and my brother (who couldn’t believe I wanted him to send me the grimy things that had been sitting in a cupboard for decades) was amazed at the transformation.
My Dad always ate saltine crackers with milk but on the occasion of left over corn bread, that would be his first choice. Always with a dash of salt added.
I never cared for cornbread and milk, but I love corn bread and vanilla ice cream. My wife fixes cornbread in a muffin pan. she can make a batch and then freeze the extras. take one out and pop it in the microwave for corn bread with soup or mix with the pea liquor.
They have all the extra crust around that makes them almost as good as the corn sticks and the pan is a lot easier to clean.
I love cornbread and I love buttermilk. Put them together and yum-yum!
Pam
scrap-n-sewgranny.blogspot.com
I made a pan of cornbread in my iron skillet on Sunday and had black-eyed peas for New Years with some pork roast. I had just remarked to the folks about how my mother would love to crumble cornbread in a glass and pour buttermilk over it for her favorite thing to eat. Would you believe I have never tried it? I may just have to after reading all those comments. 🙂
Mike McLean – If your old cornbread pan is cast iron, give it a bath in white vinegar for a couple of days followed by a soak in water infused with baking soda to kill the acid. Follow that with a good scrubbing with soapy water. It will be ready for re-seasoning without the expense of sandblasting unless you have your own sandblaster or have a friend that does.
PS: If you decide to try my method make sure the pan is completely submersed in the vinegar and the baking soda water otherwise you will get some funny looking lines where the waterline is.
IN REGARDS TO MIKES COMMENT ABOUT HIS CORNBREAD STICK PAN ,I HAVE 3-4 THAT ARE CAST IRON. I GREW UP EATING CORNBREAD & MILK .WE HAD A COUPLE OF MILK COWS & ALWAYS HAD PLENTY OF MILK TO DRINK. WE CHURNED OUR OWN BUTTER TOO, NOT IN A CHURN BUT IN A GALLON JUG WITH A LID ON IT .WE HAD TO SHAKE IT UNTIL IT TURNED TO BUTTER.
My daddy would eat cornbread and sweet milk. When I got married, my husband would eat cornbread in buttermilk. One time I had made cracklin bread and he wanted some with buttermilk. That is how we both love it now. The cracklins make it chewy and so good.
I ‘ve already posted today but reading the other posts got me to thinking. So many good things can be said, and quite a few were, about cornbread. To me, fried corn fritter bread is much like olive oil dipped ‘light bread’. Fried corn fritters is my favorite form of cornbread because, like cornbread sticks, of the high proportion of crust to center. They are the best with soup or chili or beef stew or mashed potatoes or green beans or pinto beans or cooked cabbage or….. I like crust in the cornbread and milk better than center to. Am I reminding you all of Forrest Gump’s friend and his recitation of all the ways to have grits ?
Once for fun I ordered blue corn meal from Amazon just to try blue cornbread. It looked like blueberry pancakes. I have tried to get the Mexican restaurant near us to serve cornbread and teased them about using blue corn meal. And one of them nearby actually has started using white corn meal fritters! They make a pocket in a grilled corn fritter and fill it with taco fillings. They are good.
Anybody know if masa harina (which I think of as a combination of corn flour and corn meal) will make decent corn bread?
If I understand my Bible correctly, barley bread was considered the poor man’s bread. I think in some quarters cornbread is viewed that way. It’s fine by me when folks want to leave me and other cornbread conniseurs the good stuff. Cornbread forever!
Thanks for the cornbread memories.
I love cornbread in a glass of skim milk but I’m the last one in my family who even eats it. My three grown sons won’t eat cornbread nor do my two grandsons. My Mother and her parents and grands ate cornbread and milk both ways, ‘sweet’ milk and buttermilk. There was always plenty of both from a succession of wonderful cows, all named Betsy. I do love to drink buttermilk. I think maybe you have to be raised with it.? And I was remembering after reading BPA how in my adulthood when I happened to say ‘sweet milk’ I was teased or made fun of. “Whats sweet milk?” I moved frequently and lived many times around non-mountain folks.. (they didn’t say folks either. )
One of Mothers older sisters married in 1946 ( I wasn’t around then) and moved to New Jersey where she couldn’t even buy corn meal. Every Sept she came home for a visit and took back with her as much cornmeal as she could keep. How did they ever live up there?
I don’t think they even know to this day about another of our secrets; sweet tea.
Tipper,
I love cornbread and milk but I wouldn’t turn it down if it was Buttermilk, especially Mayfield’s cause it’s thicker and just better.
As I was reading all the comments, The Pressley Girls was being played on our Christian Radio Station. “Beautiful Star of Bethlehem” is still my favorite. Enjoyed this Post today. …Ken
An update to my previous post: I have found my Mom’s old cornstick pan! It is grungy and probably needs to be sandblasted, but I hope to get it re-seasoned and back into working order.
Tipper, how I do love cornbread in milk! I also love cornbread in soup, or soup beans, or on chili, or almost any way. I think cornbread is my favorite food. My daddy loved it too, though the rest of family seem to like it much less – so maybe tastes are changing. That’s a pity.
LOVE cornbread and milk! Was raised on it and there was always cornbread in a cast iron pan on the stove, and still is today!
We use to eat it all the time when I lived at home, just kinda lost the taste for it. My Wife and Daughter love buttermilk and cornbread, just grosses me out, I don’t mind cooking with buttermilk, but just the smell makes me gag.. My Daughter laughs at me for making faces when she eats it..
Aussi, if you put milk in a glass and add cornbread it’s called a “crumble-in.” If you put cornbread in a glass and add milk it’s just plain cornbread and milk.
I have a recipe and a taste for both. Either recipe calls for cold milk and cold cornbread if you can wait that long! Bowls are not used in either recipe. It has to be a glass! Preferably a snuff glass given to you by your favorite grandmother.
We had a ministry to teens in a trailer park in GA. My wife taught a cooking class to the boys while I played basketball with the girls. (It was planned to be the other way.) When the product for the day was in the oven we had a short Bible study and then ate whatever was cooked that day. Any time my wife couldn’t go I took the makings for cornbread and a gallon of milk. One of the comments I remember was, “I ain’t et this since my great granmaw died.”
I still eat a bowl with milk any time I can get my wife to make it. Buttermilk is best but sweet milk will do.
Well, I like cornbread and milk now, thanks to your blog, Tipper. Growing up in upstate NY, near the Catskills, we certainly ate cornbread, but not with milk.
BTW – I bought soap from Chatter – one for myself, others for gifts – we all love it! Now, I just order a bracelet from Chitter. Got to support these gals’ businesses.
When I was coming up we always had a cow or two in the pasture. When the cows got into some wild onions were the only times I didn’t like their milk. But, there is an irony here. When I ate cornbread and milk, I would cut onions up in it.
In the same vein, cornbread is good crumbled into green bean juice. I purposely don’t cook them down as much as most folks so that there will be some of that golden goodness to soak up with cornbread. This also works well with veggie soup therefore I leave it a little thin, eat out the chunks and then introduce the cornbread.
We always want simple food after the holidays. My husband had blackeyed peas & cornbread last night and I had turnip greens and cornbread. He won’t eat greens–says he’d rather eat grass. I’m thinking of a big pot of tater soup today.
I don’t usually keep buttermilk but I do like it with cornbread. Last time he was here my brother took home the leftover cornbread to eat with buttermilk. Sweetmilk is yummy poured over a slice of plain cake or sugar cookies too and I love crackers dipped in creamy coffee.
Someone mentioned onions with peanut butter and crackers — this is a great combo but it needs to be a sweet onion. I add some dill pickles. Converts everyone who will try it.
Tipper,
Think about it. Near most all of our ancestors that settled here, had a cow and used every last drop of the product she produced. Only in desperation did they sacrifice the cow. Also corn was available if not grown themselves. Add a good laying hen, some hog fat and you can feed the family for days on cornbread and milk. Not counting the aigs and bacon. ha However it took some smart hard-working men, women and older children to keep the food flowing.
Mom died at 93! So that glass of cornbread and buttermilk plus black walnuts never killed her!
I love cornbread and sweet skim milk. Mother said that sometimes when things were tight when she was a child. Cornbread and milk was dinner and supper. Corn mush was for breakfast, dinner or supper during hard times.
Thanks Tipper,
PS By the way, I asked Mother how she come to know about cornbread and milk. She said her grandmother always gave her cornbread and milk when visited and she and her mother ate cornbread and milk. So this dish goes back generations in the mountains of Appalachia!
PS 2…Mom said she got sick of mush and would go to school hungry some days for spite. Especially, if she knew her Mom had some oats in the cupboard for oatmeal. Corn was cheaper back then that they grew and ground themselves.
We had this conversation over Christmas. My family eats corn bread and milk. I like mine with honey. My brothers go for sugar and my uncle likes brown sugar.
I ate the last of the pumpkin pie last night and I’m on oatmeal until I detox from holiday combat eating.
Well Tipper: I never heard sich stories about cornbread mixion! That’s what we call that cornbread in sweet milk. It shor made for a good finish for a healthy supper! Much better than going to bed hungry. Our dear grandmother Wimpey kept us in milk, when our cow would go dry! Maybe somebody out there – who has never had that cornbread mixion – will just haul off and try it! Mighty good!
Eva Nell
I’ve been eating cornbread and milk as far back as I can remember. It has to be made in an old well seasoned iron skillet
so you get the nice brown crunchy sides. I put pepper over mine and sometimes I’ll mix half sweet milk and half buttermilk just like my dad did.
I might make some today because you have done gone and flung a craving on me!
Tipper–Time changes a lot of things in the way of one’s outlook. As a boy I thought of cold cornbread and milk almost as culinary punishment. Maybe that’s because Grandma Minnie decreed that was all Grandpa Joe and I would get for supper one time when the two of us fell in the Tuckaseigee River and raised her ire. Or maybe it’s because my maternal adoptive grandmother, a penurious soul without much of a sense of humor and perhaps less of an inclination to do a lot of cooking, served cornbread and milk regularly at suppertime.
Today I absolutely love it and when I’ve got a pone of cornbread on hand find myself mighty tempted to have the combination as a bedtime snack.
Jim Casada
Yep. Cornbread and sweet milk is an old standby. As a boy staying with my Grandma and Grandpa it was almost a tradition to have some as a snack before going to bed. Fact is cornbread doesn’t keep well and is best when fresh-baked so eating the leftover cornbread at night was a smart move. If we have any, I still like cornbread and milk sometimes on Sunday night because it is too early to eat before church and too late to eat heavily afterwards.
By the way, I would maintain that cornbread and milk is more filling than an equal amount of any kind of cereal.
Mom always had a wood or coal cook stove and kept it going about 12 hours every day. When she had to be away from home before meal time, she would fix cornbread and milk for supper, always mixed up in a drinking glass. Thinking back, after building a fire and fixing the bread, that probably took longer than the time it takes to prepare our entire meal today. We loved the milk and bread suppers. I think it was the clean up we liked most. My friends think I’m crazy when I make cornbread to eat with my homemade vegetable soup. It just doesn’t taste the same with crackers.
I’ve been making hearty soups – simple, but so good! Now I’m thinking it’s time to make a pan of cornbread. I do love it with butter. And Mike McLain’s mom’s breadstick pan sounds like a handy item – cornbread sticks? Yum! I’ve not seen a pan like that one, but will be looking. Since Mike mentioned breakage, I’m guessing it was Pyrex – almost all my pots and pans are Pyrex, so a Pyrex breadstick pan would feel right at home here.
I’ve never eaten cornbread and milk. When I was growing up, my mama made mashed potato cakes in the iron frying pan, and they were golden brown and crispy around the edges. My husband likes to make mashed potato cakes for breakfast. One of my favorites!
I was raised on and still love Cornbread and milk and many times this constituted the whole meal. I prefer sweet milk, even though my Mom loved Butter Milk I could never get it to go down I told her I’d rather have my milk before it soured. I love to chop up a good Vidalia Onion in mine also. I also like saltine crackers in milk and usually have this when I’m having trouble going to sleep, it usually works wonders in that it seems to relax me and I drift off into a peaceful slumber. Just last week my wife and I were tired of all the rich holiday food had just Cornbread and milk with onions chopped up in it for supper, it was wonderful.
I really like cornbread, but with butter or honey. I prefer Sourwood honey to all I have tried. My neighbors in FL love the Sourwood honey I bring them. Finally, I have never heard of mixing cornbread with milk. I have to ink about trying that.
Never cared for cornbread and milk but the rest of my family ate it and loved it. My mother and sister also ate cornbread with cream of chicken soup over it in a bowl or glass. I never care for that either.
I think you could say I was a picky eater, I was also called a pain in the but.