The 5th President's Favorite Food Was A Souffle-Like Bread Dish

We know a lot about the presidents, and that includes their favorite foods. (For example, did you know that William Howard Taft was a big turtle soup fan?) One dish that the nation's fifth president, James Monroe, loved was spoonbread. Monroe, who served from 1817 to 1825, was from Virginia, where the first published recipe for this souffle-like cornbread appeared. It was hugely popular during his lifetime, particularly in the South, and became a traditional Southern staple.

Spoonbread is a custardy type of cornbread that's so soft it can be scooped with a spoon. A side dish or eaten on its own with butter, savory ingredients like scallions, greens, corn, or cheese, and sweet ones like fruit, honey, or maple syrup can also be mixed in. Although still beloved by many Southerners, spoonbread isn't as common as it once was and is hard to find on restaurant menus.

While spoonbread has the same main cornbread ingredients — cornmeal, eggs, butter, and milk – with added sugar, baking powder, and sometimes flour, the way it's prepared gives it a lighter, creamier texture. Hot water is mixed with the cornmeal before the other ingredients are added. In some recipes, it's just stirred in, while in others, the mixture is cooked. Some recipes make an even airier, puffier bread by separating the eggs and folding in the beaten whites before baking. When done, the batter is put into a baking dish or cast iron skillet and baked.

The 1824 cookbook "The Virginia Housewife" contains the first published spoonbread recipe. Some historians theorize that the recipe for what author Mary Randolph called "Batter Bread" may have come from James Hemings, an enslaved man who was the top chef at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello estate in Charlottesville, Virginia. The future president had brought Hemings with him when he was sent to France as the U.S. ambassador, and there, Hemings learned French cooking techniques that he incorporated into his food. Evidence for Randolph's recipe being from Hemings comes from it using small ramekins like French soufflé.

Randolph's recipe used more flour than cornmeal. However, Sarah Rutledge's 1847 cookbook, "The Carolina Housewife," has the first recipe that was more like the spoonbread that became the popular standard. She called it "Owendaw Bread," named after Awendaw, a South Carolina Sewee tribe village. (Historians assert that spoonbread's Indigenous roots go back to a corn-based Native American porridge.) Nevertheless, the word "spoon" doesn't appear in a recipe for the dish until 1904's "The Blue Grass Cookbook," which showed how to make "Spoon Corn Bread."