Chicken-fried quail was the eye-catching entrée when Guy Fieri’s “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives” paid a visit to The Noble South in Mobile, Alabama. But we need to talk about that cornbread.

See, the one recipe that the Food Network chose to share from that segment, in an episode that premiered on Friday, Oct. 20, is The Noble South Heirloom Cornbread. Scanning through the recipe, one stumbles across not one, but two potentially polarizing ingredients. It calls for a third of a cup of sugar and a cup and a half of mayonnaise.

First up, the sugar. Chris Rainosek says it all goes back to the “heirloom” part of the heirloom cornbread.

“I’m certainly aware of the great debate, of sugar versus no sugar in cornbread,” Rainosek said. “But what I will say is, ours is certainly not sweet. It’s more for balance. We use this great heirloom cornmeal from Bayou Cora Farms. It’s this mixture of yellow, blue, red corn, so our cornbread has a little different color, it has a super-savory flavor, and all that corn isn’t necessarily just sweet corn. That cornmeal has more of a savory thing going on, so we felt like it needed just a touch of sugar to bump it up.”

That’s not something you’re necessarily going to find in every supermarket. Bayou Cora Farms is a Baldwin County operation that traces its beginnings back across six generations to 1875. According to the history section on their website, that span includes a 24-year stretch where the only remaining stock of Bayou Cora corn was a one-pound bag stored in a freezer. That eventually was grown into bigger and bigger crops, and now Bayou Cora Farms uses it in a variety of products including grits, corn flour and fish fry mix. Ordered through the Bayou Cora website, it runs $5 for a 1-pound bag.

Between the savory flavor of the cornmeal and the buttermilk used in the cornbread, Rainosek said, the sugar just evens things out.

“We cook it in pork fat, we have all these other things in there,” said Rainosek. “We push the salt kind of right to the limit of where we think it can go. We felt like it needed a touch in there just for balance, more so than to make it sweet. I’ve never had anybody say, in the years we’ve been using that recipe and those ingredients specifically, that it is too sweet. I don’t think it presents as sweet at all.”

As for the mayo, it’s not as unusual as you might think. And the logic is simple.

“Mayonnaise is basically eggs and oil, of which both are pretty common ingredients in cornbread or anything with a cakey texture,” said Rainosek. “That was the direction we decided to go. It worked well. I don’t know if it’ll make it to the episode but I do remember Guy commenting on that as well.”

The red and blue granules speckled through the mix lend another distinguishing characteristic to the cornbread served at The Noble South, as Rainosek hinted. It’s dark. So dark that a first-time visitor might wonder if it was burned.

“That, we do get pushback on every once in a while,” said Rainosek. “The color is more again from the mixture of corn that’s in there because you have those darker red and blue kernels in the mixture. When it’s raw, when we get it, it’s not even yellow at all. It’s grayish and has all these specks of red and blue in there. That’s really where the color comes from.”

How does all this unfold on the plate, and the palate? Very nicely. A slice of Noble South cornbread comes out on its own plate like a slice of cake, with no butter on the side, and you wonder if maybe that’s an accidental omission. Despite the darkness, the crust is light. The first bite hits your tongue and the savory quality just bursts out – even though, as you’ll note, the recipe doesn’t call for any savory spices. You might find yourself instantly craving a pan of Thanksgiving dressing made with the stuff.

Somewhere along the line, you’ll realize that you completely forgot about maybe wanting a pat of butter. Maybe that’s because the mayo provides all the rich moistness you could want. Or maybe it’s because, as Rainosek revealed, they top the slice with a little butter and let that melt in as they warm it before serving.

It’s good stuff. And no, it doesn’t come off as sugar-sweet.

“We’ve got a little bit of acidity from the buttermilk, and then the super-savory corn, a little bit of sugar, the fatty richness from the pork fat, and then we get the crispy edges” from cooking it in cast iron, said Rainosek. “Hitting all those different marks is what we were looking for.”