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Bread

Cream Butter Bread

A cornmeal bread made with butter, eggs, sour milk, and baking soda.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Cream Butter Bread

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. Pour very hot water over the cornmeal and stir well.

  2. Add salt and butter, mixing until combined.

  3. In a separate bowl, beat the eggs and then add them to the mixture.

  4. Dissolve the baking soda in the sour milk and add it to the batter.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour the batter into a deep pan and bake until golden.

  2. Serve quickly with plenty of butter.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Corn + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  3. Corn + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,345 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Corn meal
Forms the main body of the bread and gives it its characteristic grainy texture.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure as the bread sets.
Sour milk
Adds moisture and acidity that reacts with the baking soda.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic sour milk to produce gas that lifts the batter.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a tender crumb.

The step that matters

Dissolve the baking soda in the sour milk and add it to the batter.. Baking soda needs an acid, such as the sour milk, to react and release gas for lift. Mixing it fully into the milk first spreads it evenly so the bread rises uniformly rather than in patches.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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