Yellow Cornmeal Cornbread

Recipe Instructions About this cornbread--real cornbread--discussion. My daddy told me anyone who put sugar and/or flour in cornbread was a damn Yankee and probably a sissy to boot. My grandmother, a fine southern country cook, poured yellow cornmeal in a bowl, made a nest in the top, tossed in baking powder, salt, an egg, and sweet milk. After it was stirred up good, she added the hot bacon drippings from the iron skillet which had been heating on the top of the wood cook stove. She poured the batter in the skillet leaving it on the top of the stove until the top of the fairly stiff batter was "set." Then she'd flip the whole thing over--a trick which takes practice, cover the skillet and move it to a lower temperature part of the stove. The texture was coarse and the color was brown on the outside and golden in the inside. It was great when hot and really good cold, especially with a thin slice of country ham slipped in the middle and a glass of cold buttermilk to wash it down. As for quantities for the recipe, it is all measured by sight and hand. My mother learned from her, and I from my mother. Any time I tried to measure it, it failed. As for my grandmother, she only lived to be 87 and my grandfather only made it to 96. Musta been all that cornbread, bacon drippings, country ham and buttermilk that killed 'em.