a dishcornbread

A quick bread of cornmeal — meal, water or buttermilk, salt, fat, often egg and soda — baked in a pan, a skillet or a stick mould. It comes with eastern North Carolina barbecue in two forms. At the Skylight Inn in Ayden it is a flat, dense cake of stone-ground cornmeal, water, salt and the day's hog drippings, spread thin on a sheet pan, baked and cut in squares; Our State calls it more grit cake than bread. At Parker's, B's, Bum's and a third of the pits in six Coastal Plain counties it is the corn stick, an eight-inch baton of meal, fat and boiling water, baked, then deep-fried. West of the Coastal Plain the bread is hushpuppies.

Cornbread is the older bread of the South. Wheat withered and turned rancid in the heat and humidity, so the colonies baked ground corn and water over the fire or in the hearth, a bread learned from Native cooks; buttermilk, eggs, soda and pork fat came into it in the 1700s and 1800s, and sugar and wheat flour mostly in the 1900s, when steel roller mills replaced stone ones and the meal lost sweetness and turned from white to yellow. The Skylight Inn's cornbread stays on the old side of that line: cornmeal, water, salt and pork drippings, made the same way since Pete Jones opened in 1947, and served at his grandson Sam Jones's restaurants as 'Skylight Inn-style cornbread'. The corn stick is younger than it looks. Bob Melton's Rocky Mount restaurant, the state's first sit-down barbecue house, served cornsticks beside boiled potatoes and hushpuppies from 1924 until it closed in 2005, and NCpedia lists baked corn sticks first among the Coastal Plain's sides; but nearly every corn stick sold in the region now comes from Atkinson's Mills in Selma, which began making them in the mid-to-late 1970s. In the six counties around Wilson and Greenville about one pit in three serves them and the rest serve hushpuppies, and on B's menu board in Greenville they are simply 'bread'.

The Skylight cake is stone-ground cornmeal stirred with water and salt to a pourable batter, enriched with drippings from the pit, spread on a sheet pan and baked until it sets and browns; it comes out coarse, heavy and chewy, and is cut in squares for the tray. A corn stick is meal, fat and boiling water with a little soda, baked in an eight-inch stick and then dropped in the fryer, so that most of it is crisp and the middle soft; the grease keeps it from drying out the way a hushpuppy does, and it reheats. At B's the corn sticks are the plate's bread; at Bum's cornbread sits on the buffet with the vegetables. Skillet cornbread — batter poured into hot fat in a cast-iron pan — is the home form.

Skylight Inn serves it on every tray and sells it by the slice, a dollar each in September 2025; Sam Jones BBQ in Winterville and Raleigh lists 'Skylight Inn-style cornbread' with the Jones Family Original tray (2026). Parker's in Wilson sells cornsticks and hushpuppies both by the bulk order and puts hushpuppies on every plate. Corn sticks hold in six counties; the rest of the state fries hushpuppies.