Secret Recipe: Elite Cafe's Cornbread

7x7 asks the city's chefs for the recipes to their most loved cocktails, bar snacks, starters, mains, and desserts. If there's a dish you can't stop thinking about and want to make at home, email lauren@7x7.com. Your wish may end up on the blog, along with the actual recipe from the chef.

For 30 years, the Elite Cafe in Pacific Heights has been serving New Orleans fare such as hominy-crusted catfish with ham hock and seafood gumbo. Whatever you get, an order of their buttery, down-home cornbread is a must. You'll need a cast-iron pan and a little patience while you wait for the cornbread to cool before tucking in.

1/2 cup organic yellow cornmeal

2/3 cup sugar

3/4 cup all-purpose flour

1 tablespoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon kosher salt

1 tablespoon honey

1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 large egg

1 cup milk

1/2 cup corn oil

1. Preheat oven to 325 degrees.

2. Mix all the dry ingredients together in a bowl.

3. In a separate bowl, mix all the wet ingredients together, and then combine wet and dry ingredients.

4. Pour mixture into a 9-inch cast-iron skillet pan, and bake for about 40 minutes, or until the center is firm.

5. Let cornbread cool in the skillet before slicing.

Look, I'm from Chicago, and even I know that a cornbread that has MORE SUGAR THAN CORNMEAL (not to mention the honey - and the VANILLA!) is just flat-ass wrong. WRONG. SMDH!

By sundevilpeg (not verified) on January 19, 2012

Agree 100% with Anonymous comment of August 26, 2011: This is not no-way no-how Southern cornbread. It is what, after first tasting it in the Yankee stronghold of Washington D.C. on my 9th grade trip there, I dubbed corncake.

While we're at it, Southern hash browns are good-sized chunks of potato sautéed with peppers and onions in a rudimentary gravy/pan sauce. The shredded stuff called hash browns in the North cannot hold a candle to real hash browns.

One other thing I never had until I traveled north of the Mason-Dixon line: cake brownies. Everyone I knew made fudge brownies, which they called simply "brownies" because there was no other kind. Oh, Southerners made cake brownies. We just called it "cake" (with no icing).

I don't miss the people one bit, but I do miss the food.

By Rainier Wolfcastle (not verified) on October 19, 2011

Grew up in the south. No one I know puts sugar in their corn bread. In the north though, they make a version that taste like cake and utterly lacks the grainy crumble of actual corn bread.

By Anonymous (not verified) on August 26, 2011

One of my favorite flavor pairings is cornmeal and berries. I love how the sweetness of the cornmeal compliments ripe summer fruit. So far I’ve paired up cherries (both for pancakes and cake) and blueberries with cornmeal to wonderful effect. When we recently got a quart of sugar plums in our farm share I wondered if they might pair nicely with cornbread as well.

buy computer

By Derlierprossy (not verified) on August 07, 2011

Corn bread

By Anonymous (not verified) on July 26, 2011