Skip to main content
Main

Breakfast Corncake

A baked cornmeal and flour cake flavored with salt, sugar, and sour milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Flour and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Breakfast Corncake

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point. The book gives no cooking times either; the times in the steps were added in transcription, so check for doneness rather than trusting the clock.

Prepare

  1. Preheat your oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. In a bowl, mix the Indian meal, flour, salt, and sugar.

  3. In another bowl, combine the sour milk and baking soda.

Mix and bake

  1. Pour the sour milk mixture into the dry ingredients and stir until just combined.

  2. Pour the batter into a greased baking dish and bake for 25-30 minutes or until golden brown.

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. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Indian meal
Provides the coarse cornmeal body and corn flavor that defines the cake.
All-purpose flour
Adds gluten-forming structure so the cake holds its shape.
Sour milk
Its acidity reacts with baking soda to produce gas that makes the cake rise.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in sour milk to leaven the batter and aid browning.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the crust brown in the oven.

The step that matters

Stir the batter until just combined. Overmixing develops gluten in the flour, which can make the cake tough and dense. Stopping once the dry and wet ingredients are just combined keeps it tender, and the baking soda begins reacting as soon as it meets the acidic sour milk, so the batter should go into the oven promptly.

“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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes