Skip to main content
Bread

Cornmeal Scones

A quick cornmeal muffin made with baking powder, salt, sugar, butter, and cold milk.

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

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 ↓

Cornmeal Scones

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Mix baking powder, salt, and sugar into cornmeal.

  2. Rub in the butter with your hands.

Mix and bake

  1. Add enough cold milk to make a batter that will drop from a spoon.

  2. Bake in muffin rings on a griddle like ordinary muffins.

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. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

Sugar and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Baking powder
Provides the lift that makes the scones rise and turn light.
Cornmeal
Forms the main body of the scones and gives their grainy, sturdy texture.
Butter
Adds fat that tenderizes the crumb and adds richness.
Milk
Hydrates the cornmeal so it forms a spoonable batter.

The step that matters

Adding the milk. Too much milk makes a batter that runs instead of holding its shape, while too little leaves dry, crumbly scones. Cornmeal absorbs liquid slowly, so add it gradually until the batter just drops from a spoon.

“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

CornbreadCornbread345 recipesBread PuddingBread Pudding336 recipesMilk Bread RollsMilk Bread Rolls242 recipesPotato BreadPotato Bread124 recipes