Bacon and Marmalade Cornbread

It would be remiss of me to conclude a chapter on breakfast with nary a mention of bacon, that most beloved of British breakfast stuffs. My general view is that bacon is best fried until crisp, then stuck in between two slices of soft, floury white bread with slightly more English mustard than is wise, but as everyone knows how to prepare that, I’ll concede it works pretty well in this American recipe too.

Cornbread has been eaten for millennia in the Americas – the corn tortillas of central America were a key part of the Mayan and Aztec diets, and European settlers were quick to develop a taste for corn pone, johnny cakes and other such unfamiliar delicacies. (According to Wikipedia, ‘the term “corn pone” is sometimes [wonderfully!] used to refer to one who possesses certain rural, unsophisticated peculiarities’.) These would traditionally have been prepared in a cast-iron skillet, which can go from stovetop to oven – if you don’t have an ovenproof pan, you can bake this in a cake tin instead, although you’ll miss out on some of that lovely bacon-y flavour.

Because one of my favourite foodie discoveries of the last couple of years has been the joy of bacon and marmalade sandwiches, I’ve added some chopped peel too, in homage to the northern American tradition of sweet cornbread, but you can leave it out if you don’t fancy it.