I’ve never made, or even tasted, cornbread before. It seems to be specifically American. I had some polenta powder in the cupboard (corn meal) so thought I’d give it a whirl and looked for some recipes. That’s when I found most of them called for eggs. Which is fine for me but not my daughter so time to look a bit harder.

I couldn’t find a recipe for egg free cornbread that was in measurements I can follow so I made my own using the normal substitutions for egg; white vinegar and a bit more non-dairy milk.

I also used self-raising flour for the lift. All the American recipes use plain flour and baking soda but as that’s already in self-raising flour I skipped it.

I served this with linguine, steamed chicken breast, my basic tomato sauce and some roasted pointed peppers mixed into the sauce.

To roast the peppers: Cut the peppers into chunks and coat in olive oil. Add a little salt and pepper then roast at 180°C fan for 20 minutes.

As for cornbread, it’s more like a cake than a bread. Too sweet for a side to a main. I think i’ll leave out the syrup next time, the corn makes it sweet enough already.

Serves: 8

Ingredients

• 185g corn meal/polenta
• 200g self-raising flour
• 50g sugar
• 0.5 tsp salt
• 290ml soya milk
• 110ml olive oil
• 1 tbsp white vinegar
• 1 tbsp golden syrup (or corn syrup)
• 20g Flora Buttery (vegan margarine)

Method

• Put the oven on 190°C (180°C fan/gas mark 5).
• Grease a tin with the margarine. I used an oblong tin 28cm x 17cm.
• Put the dry ingredients into a bowl and mix.
• Add the wet ingredients and mix vigorously until you have a thick batter.
• Scrape the batter into the greased tin and spread out as evenly as you can.
• Bake for 20 minutes. Check the middle with a skewer and if it comes out clean, it’s done.

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