Tina Turner's Iconic Cornbread Was Created On A Motel Room Hot Plate

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There's some Tina Turner trivia that only her biggest fans are aware of. For example, she's one of only three women to be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame twice (the others being Carole King and Stevie Nicks). Or that she set the Guinness World Record for the largest paying concert attendance for a solo artist when she drew 188,000 fans to the stadium in Rio de Janeiro in 1988. But belting out timeless classics on tour wasn't always as glamorous a way of life as you might expect. In fact, Turner and her crew would sometimes have to make cornbread in their motel room as going out to eat wasn't an option.

This story goes back to the 1960s, when Jim Crow laws prevented African-Americans from dining wherever they wanted in the South and Midwest. Tina Turner and her husband, Ike, would finish performing their set and head back to their motel room. According to Robbie Montgomery, one of the Ikettes, who travelled with the couple, they'd cook up the cornbread in the hotel room using a hot plate. "I'd pour the batter in the hot skillet, cook it for a bit, put a plate on top of it, and then turn it over onto the plate," Montgomery writes in "Sweetie Pie's Cookbook" (via Anne Byrn Substack). "Then I'd slide that cornbread back into the skillet real gentle so the other side could finish browning up. Once it was done and you tasted a slice, boy, you could die!" It does spound like this motel-made cornbread was simply the best ... which is partly why this hotplate dish associated with the star singer has become iconic.

Cornbread is a popular southern American staple made using cornmeal. While you can buy boxed cornbread mixes – here are 10 of them, ranked best to worst – cornbread is one of those things where every family has their own secret recipe. 

Tina Turner's recipe, published in "Sweetie Pie's Cookbook", includes bacon, cornmeal, and buttermilk, as well as baking powder and soda. The bacon is fried on a hot skillet. The fat is added to the main cornbread batter, along with salt, cornmeal, flour, sugar, baking powder and baking soda. Once the buttermilk and egg are stirred in, in go the fried pieces of bacon. Incidentally, Turner's recipe is very similar to Dolly Parton's, whose easy cornbread recipe comes together with just three Southern staples — cornmeal, buttermilk, and bacon droppings.

The one thing that separates great cornbread from the inedible is the level of moistness once cooked. Turner's recipe uses bacon fat and buttermilk to make sure the result isn't dry and powdery. Some other ingredients you can use to achieve similar results are milk or Greek yogurt. Sour cream is another foolproof addition for cornbread that's actually moist.