Cornbread

“The early settlers of our country frequently baked their Indian cakes under the ashes of their wood fires; and the custom is still continued by those who cannot yet obtain the means of cooking them more conveniently.” Thus wrote cookbook author Eliza Leslie in 1854 in reference to America’s original cornbread, a hand-shaped cake composed only of cornmeal (or Indian meal, as Americans originally called it) and water that was baked directly in the fire. European settlers, early and late, baked this Indian cake because they often had neither the time nor the materials nor any sort of oven needed to bake raised wheat bread. The settlers learned this cake from the native peoples and often called it by a name derived from the Algonquian language family: “pone.”