African American

Cornbread for African Americans is a side dish in soul food. Although African American foodways received heavy influence from not only the British but also indigenous populations, the economic differences between slaves and whites in colonial history meant that African Americans relied on cheaper food in order to subsist, in turn lower costs for food. Having previous exposure to foodstuffs such as maize, they readily adapted rice, corn and cooking techniques from their Native neighbors, introducing certain staple crops to plantation owners. Cornbread would be served as a side dish with a variety of foods such as collard greens, chitterlings and other meats. According to McWilliams, "[w]hites may have eaten high on the hog while blacks ate low, but they both ate from the same hog." Items such as cornbread, while still a symbol of lower class, could transcend race. African Americans having no financial mobility were able to eat cornbread and brought the foodstuff into close connection with their own identity. The differences between Southern cornbread and African American made lies more in meaning and history than within the cornbread itself. Cornbread as a cheap food was able to consolidate the eating practices of the lower class. Regardless of race, if one was poor cornbread could easily nourish the body. While Soul food makes the case for cornbread to empower people through eating history and past grievances, cornbread itself is a symbol of a food staple able to cross racial boundaries as a lower class food. African Americans would sometimes bake the cornbread with a variety of fats in order to make "cracklin" cornbread which had the fat of certain types of meats mixed into the batter. African Americans while cooking cornbread often lacked the wide range of tools of whites and thus improvised using such devices as the hoe and other more simplistic means to create their breads. Also much like other Southerners, they did not cut nearly as much flour into their batter causing their bread to have a more coarse texture.