Group 4 Proposal

=On the Matter of Cornbread= This semester the students of Professor Moon's American Foodways course will be researching four foods found within the United States and tracing their separate histories. As the semester develops our thesis, as well as our colleagues', will expand with new research and data. It is our hope that this semester these projects will be of interest not only to our instructor, but also to the public who has a hankering for trivia. We, Group 4 of the food class, will be uncovering the story of cornbread, and as you will see below cornbread is an elusive one with many diverging paths.

Thesis and Research Questions
Soul food, Southern cooking, Mexican-American, African-American, lower class and delicious are all words that describe the object of our study, cornbread. Much like its essential ingredient, corn, this bread's popularity transcends regionalisms. Large swaths of America can identify with this product. Cornbread's story is not only one of flexibility among people groups, it also demonstrates how initial settlers in the Americas adapted to a Native American foodway. Many colonizers took this easy and cheap bread from the indigenous tribes and made it their own. The British settlers used cornbread to substitute for many of the breads they would get at home. The Spanish in the South and Southwest also worked cornbread into their diets. As we explore the history of this delicious morsel, we will be seeking the following:


 * cornbread's origins
 * the ways in which it transcends ethnic boundaries
 * its relation to national brands
 * how are people eating it now
 * whether people eating this globally

Throughout this semester (Fall 2010), We hope to hone our thesis and argument as we do further research on cornbread's histories.

Background
As corn grew widely in the Americans, and the Native Americans made it a staple to their diet, many of the settlers and later immigrants made this cheap food source an important part of their foodway. Thus, one may see the story of cornbread in many different foodways over regions having distinctly different cooking styles. Although we cannot pin cornbread down to one identity, its main ingredient corn is however cheap and abundant which places cornbread as a poorer, possibly lower class, food. Before colonists came to America, the Native Americans were already eating and cooking with maize or Indian corn. When the colonists arrived to the New World, they had to learn to live here and eat what was available. Often, they relied on the Native Americans to show them what was edible and how to eat it. The colonists are able to adapt to the plants around them and even incorporate corn into their everyday diet, particularly those in the South who grew corn as a staple crop. Eventually, cornbread enters the idea of "Soul Food" through African American population during and after the civil war. Other than the South, cornbread was also adapted in the southwest via the Mexican American population. As immigrants from many places come to America in the 19th-20th centuries, they adapted just as easily to cornbread. As many immigrants were also poor, this shows that cornbread is a very easily accessible and cheap food. In the 18th Century, we will examine how developing grain mixes was becoming a family business and by the early 19th Century, we begin to see cornbread mixes, such as Martha White and Jiffy, hit the market. Today there are many brands of cornbread mix in the local grocery store. Interestingly enough, these mixes continue to be relatively cheap, often staying under a dollar.

Further Notes and Comments
This semester the American Foodways class will be researching three other foods. I highly suggest you visit their wikis and see the stories of these different foods unfurl. You can find the proposal page for hotdogs here, hamburgers here, and finally our brother in corn, pop corn here. As this is an online project and a story about a topic which we can all relate, we would encourage any and all feedback on our work. In the coming weeks we hope to actively pursue cornbread's story for hungry eyes online. With all of that in mind, if you have fond memories of cornbread or would like to share your own personal recipes, we would love to talk to you. The benefits to an online project is the sort of collaboration that can be found in a space such as this. While Group 4 are the final authors of this project, a multitude of readers and commentators makes the project more fun and enjoyable than the traditional paper.

Please send any and all comments to jcalpin@mail.umw.edu You can follow me on twitter at bahktinjali

Props
Group 4 is not just a nameless entity that churns out award winning ideas, we are also individuals! Joe Calpin and Elizabeth Angell run this project.