Beyond Cornbread

Delicious no-meat recipes for your holiday table.

Cornbread often makes an appearance at the Thanksgiving table, but as Martha Rose Shulman explains in this week’s Recipes for Health, home cooks can find lots of creative ways to use cornmeal.

I include cornmeal in my grouping of Thanksgiving foods, as corn is one of the Native American foods that sustained the Pilgrims during their first difficult years in the colonies. Cornmeal can be at the center of your plate in the form of spoonbread or polenta, or it can be one ingredient in a mixed-grain bread or pastry. This week I looked to the American South and beyond for recipes, and found some of the most delightful dishes in Greece. Turkey is another Mediterranean country where you find cornmeal in recipes, particularly in rustic country breads.

Here are five new ways to use cornmeal in your holiday cooking. And visit Well’s interactive recipe collection to see more vegetarian Thanksgiving recipes; we will be adding new dishes daily.

Jalapeño Spoonbread: Spoonbread, a traditional Southern dish, is sort of a cross between a soufflé and polenta.

Cornmeal Cranberry Drop Scones: Whip these up if you’ve got a crowd coming for Thanksgiving.

Greek Greens Pie With Cornmeal Crust: This is a beautiful, rustic and comforting dish adapted from recipes from Epirus, a mountainous region of northwestern Greece.

Greek Polenta With Onions and Raisins: This is adapted from a recipe I came across in “The Glorious Foods of Greece,” by Diane Kochilas.

Yeasted Country Bread With Cornmeal: Cornmeal is used in many breads in the Mediterranean and southern Europe, especially in Turkey and Portugal.