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Corn Dodgers

Corn Dodgers are fried cornmeal balls made with hot water, salt, corn meal, flour, egg, and lard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Corn and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,165 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Corn Dodgers

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Bring 3 pints of hot water to a boil in a pot.

  2. Add ¼ teaspoon salt and corn meal until the mixture is smooth and thick like cake batter.

  3. Cook for 10 to 15 minutes, stirring continuously until well done.

  4. Once cool, mix in ½ cup of flour and 1 egg using your hands.

Shape and fry

  1. Mould the mixture into round balls the size of an egg, wetting your hands with cold water to prevent sticking.

  2. Drop the balls into hot lard and fry for nearly 30 minutes.

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. Corn + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,165 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Corn + eggtop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,484 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

Flour and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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

Corn meal
Forms the thick batter that sets into the body of the dodger.
Flour
Adds structure so the cooked mixture holds its shape when shaped and fried.
Egg
Binds the mixture together and adds richness to the dough.
Hot lard
Fries the outside, giving a crisp, browned crust and rich flavour.

The step that matters

Wetting hands before shaping. The cooked mixture is sticky and hot, so cold water on the hands keeps it from clinging while the balls are formed. Shaping the dough while it is too warm or with dry hands makes it tear and stick.

“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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