Cornbread, comfort food for body and soul

Stress baking. It's a thing that actually helps, and in the realm of comfort food, few things do it for me like cornbread. One of my stockpile items is cornmeal, which I use for breading fish and thickening chili among many other uses. I typically buy polenta (or grits in Americanese), which generically means coarse ground cornmeal. (We Americans often use the word for a specific dish.) I like Bob's Red Mill (employee-owned, B-Corp, does the right thing), although you can only buy a 25-pound bag at the moment, or support local New York farmers and the post office.
So how do you make cornbread? I started with this as a base, with a couple of modifications: I use 1-1/4 c. polenta to 3/4 c. wheat flour, added a can of white corn kernels for some added chew and moistness. Depending on how grainy or smooth you like it, you can vary the polenta/flour ratio between 1:1 and 5:3 either way, and from no kernels to the full can.
As for baking it, I first heated a cast iron skillet over high heat and greased it with pork fat. I poured the batter in, cooked it on the stovetop for a few minutes to brown the edges and bottom, then transferred to a 450ºF oven for 20 minutes. This is with the caveat that I like the bottom browned and crispy, even slightly charred. If you don't, skip the stovetop and bake at 400ºF. If you want to kick it up, add some shredded cheese on top and broil for a couple of minutes.
For this morning's breakfast I drizzled it with hot honey-- the heat from Lola's Trinidad Scorpion Sauce. Damn, that's good.
For those looking to make this vegan or gluten-free (I'm neither so can't directly vouch for it), I can suggest the following. Vegans, obviously skip the butter and pork fat, with coconut or avocado oil being good substitutes, or some form of vegetable oil spread or margarine or make your own? Vegan egg substitutes, based on advice from a vegan friend who bakes a lot of bread, include the water from canned chickpeas or flax meal dissolved in water. To make it gluten-free, others probably know better, but King Arthur and Bob's both offer gluten-free 1-1 baking flour. If you have more experience with this, please leave your advice in the comments.