Cornpones

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A type of bread made from cornmeal, often served as a side dish in Southern cuisine
2. A traditional baked or fried product made from ground corn, commonly enjoyed in various regional dishes
3. A cornmeal-based bread that is typically dense and slightly sweet, popular in American comfort food recipes

Etymology: Cornpone is a compound of "corn" and "pone," and the second half is the more interesting one. "Pone" comes from Algonquian languages of the Atlantic coast, where the word for a simple bread of ground maize was adapted by English colonists in Virginia in the 1600s. The Latin "panis" and "pain"-related ideas have nothing to do with it; the link is to the cornmeal bread the colonists learned to eat from the Indigenous peoples they met. Both parts of the name are English and old: "corn" in its earlier sense meant any grain, and only later came to mean maize in American usage. Cornpone therefore names a dish made from the staple grain of the colonies, shaped into cakes and fried rather than baked. The plural "cornpones" is simply the regular form of the noun, referring to more than one of these cakes.