The Childhood Breakfast Dish Alex Guarnaschelli Still Cherishes Today

The most memorable meal Alex Guarnaschelli ever ate was a birthday dinner cooked by her mom. While the feast starred scallops and chocolate-caramel cake, there's another staple dish Guarnaschelli's mother regularly prepared that the celebrity chef still adores after all these years: cornbread.

"My mother made cornbread a lot," Guarnaschelli recalled in an interview with Taste of Home, adding that she often plated it with salty bacon and fluffy eggs. Baking cornbread later became a tradition for Guarnaschelli and her own daughter. "I bake it in my mom's dish, and Ava scoops it out with the same pie knife that my mother used. It's like, everything changes, everything stays the same."

Guarnaschelli was born in Missouri and grew up in Manhattan, where her mom, Maria Guarnaschelli, was a renowned cookbook editor. Given her background, it's not a total surprise that she grew up loving this Southern staple. "When I was a kid, my mother had a classic American cookbook," Guarnaschelli explained in an episode of "Alex's Day Off." "This cookbook ... had a classic cornbread recipe just like this one, and I used to measure it out, and make it myself, and bake it in the oven, all while my parents slept." She remembers the experience as the instant she knew she'd become a chef when she grew up.

Alex Guarnaschelli's cornbread recipe feeds a crowd and takes less than an hour to prepare. Unlike old-school Southern cornbread, which uses all cornmeal, Guarnaschelli's version calls for a mix of cornmeal and flour, making it light and cakey. It also incorporates sugar, another departure from the classic kind, since the sweet ingredient has no place in traditional cornbread.

Nevertheless, those who've tried her modernized take say it's worth making. In fact, fellow Food Network host Aarti Sequeira made the recipe and shared the results on her Facebook page writing, "As a fairly new Southerner, I must mention to my brethren down here that this is a softer, sweeter version of a Southern-style cornbread ... This isn't the cornbread you ladle beans over, but it sure is good alongside a bowl of chili or with a slathering of jam in the morning."

Make like Guarnaschelli and pair it with bacon and eggs for a palatable mix of complementary flavors and textures. Bacon and bacon fat (a secret ingredient that makes Southern cornbread more delicious) are common cornbread ingredients. Sprinkling some cheese in the batter wouldn't hurt either, and it'd likely yield a moister crumb. The cornbread's sweetness makes it a prime pairing for barbecue and fried chicken, but for breakfast vibes, douse it with butter and jam or Southern-style sausage gravy.