Cornbread are square at Charlotte Senior Center

At press time the volunteer cooks at the Charlotte Senior Center are undecided about whether their main course will be lasagna, soup or chili.

For sure, the menu will include a simple green salad, cornbread and chocolate chip cookies.

Cornbread offers many possibilities. When ordering sopa in Paraguay, you don’t get a steaming bowl of broth but instead a dense and cheesy hunk of a cornbread that rates its own page in Wikipedia.

There are a number of origin stories about this particular cornbread. According to a New York Times piece, in the mid-1800s, when Carlos Antonio López was president of Paraguay, he was often served corn soup for lunch. But one day, the chef added in too much cornmeal. Trying for a fix, the chef put this sopa into the oven and then served it as cornbread. President López loved the bread so much that he named it sopa Paraguaya and decreed it a national dish.

This is a “maybe so” story. A number of food sleuths point to much earlier roots for the dish, tracing it to the Cario-Guaraní, Indigenous people in Paraguay,

Whatever its origins, put “cornbread” in a search at The NY Times, and you’ll find over 1,600 possibilities. From cloves, cabbage, chorizo, Cajun seasoning and coconut to pecans, pumpkin, peppers, sweet potatoes — and more.

Let Craig Claiborne, Pierre Franey and Mark Bittman argue about whether cornbread should be made with regular or evaporated milk. Bill Clinton has noted his love of the simplest of cornbreads: hot-water cornbread.

The very idea of “cornbread madeleines with jalapeño” stopped me in my tracks. The recipe calls for both buttermilk and whole milk, and a whopping two teaspoons of salt. As ever, let the reader beware. Many readers who tried the recipe complained about way too much salt.

In “Dinner with the President: Food, Politics, and a History of Breaking Bread at the White House,” Alex Prud’homme describes corn dodgers, small oval-shaped treats, about 2 inches long, made with stone-ground cornmeal fried in butter or bacon drippings — Abraham Lincoln’s equivalent to Proust’s madeleines. Lincon’s cousin Dennis Hanks remembered young Abe putting a book inside his shirt, filling his pants pockets with corn dodgers before going off to plow or hoe: “When noon came he’d set under a tree an’ read an’ eat.”

Here in Charlotte, every time I make cornbread I think of the ongoing quarrel between my mother and her mother. Cooking near Los Angeles, Grandma used a little sugar. Near Sacramento, Mom was vocal about regarding sugar in cornbread as the eighth deadly sin.

Don’t look to the paper that offers “all the news that’s fit to print” for an answer. Craig Claiborne and Sam Sifton don’t use sugar; Pierre Franey recommends 1 teaspoon; Mark Bittman’s recipe calls for a whopping 1/4-1/2 cup of sugar.

“The Emily Dickinson Cookbook” shows us that while writing poems about corn, Emily used two tablespoons of brown sugar when making her corn cakes.

Forget quarrels about sugar and heed New York Times opinion writer Margaret Renkl’s cornbread memory, written during the pandemic, “Cornbread Now, More than Ever”: “My great-grandmother died when I was in college, taking her recipe for lacy corn cakes with her to the grave, and my grandmother and my mother are gone now, too. Still, I feel them nearby whenever I take a skillet full of cornbread out of the oven.”

Renkl concludes: “Whatever else is happening outside my windows, whatever struggles are still ahead, just the sight of that golden disk of buttery goodness can make me feel a tiny bit better.”

Inspired by “Recipes for Connection,” a booklet published by U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, Project Gather promotes the idea that eating with others can bring joy, build interpersonal connections and help solve a loneliness epidemic affecting so many people. In Murthy’s words, “When we gather with others around food, we not only feed our bodies but also nourish our spirits.”

I don’t want to knock this noteworthy endeavor but can’t help noting that one of the “collective of change makers” sponsoring the Project Gather website offers a 16-ounce bottle of Heritage Extra Virgin Olive Oil, made with olives hand-picked in Ojai, Calif., for $85 (plus shipping). For those not picking olives, Ojai is a town noted for meditation, yoga, spas and wine tasting.

Another sponsor describes chefs infusing coffee with sunchoke purée and avocado, and flavoring it with ginger, lemongrass and rosemary smoke. We’re told that in some high-end places coffee drinkers can get the Zen of coffee, the omakase treatment. Through five courses, coffee comes with lemon grass, kumquat ice cream, honey-apple syrup, blueberries, fermented tomato juice. And more.

When you go to Monday Munch at the Charlotte Senior Center, you won’t find pumpkin or sweet potatoes in your cornbread or fermented tomato juice in your coffee. What you will find is a golden disk of buttery goodness served in a place offering good nourishment for your spirit as well as your body.

As we face another Trump crisis, I offer the third book in my Trump series: “Trump, Trump, Trump: The Swan Song.” There are plenty of laughs, but for a “feel good” vibe, be sure to eat cornbread while reading it. Actually, you’ll find more laughs in the orange guy’s own words: “The Little Red Book of Trump Quotations.”