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Bread

Corn Pone

Corn pone is a cornmeal bread made with buttermilk, water, salt, baking soda, melted fat, and cooked on a hot griddle.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Corn and buttermilk work together. They rank in the top 24% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 226 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Corn Pone

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderately hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Mix the batter

  1. Sift together the corn meal, salt, and baking soda.

  2. Stir in the buttermilk and water.

  3. Add the melted fat and beat until smooth.

Shape and bake

  1. Wet your hands in cold water and shape the mixture into small pones.

  2. Brush a griddle or pan with melted fat and heat until smoking hot.

  3. Place the pones on the griddle and bake until thoroughly done and 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. Corn + buttermilktop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together226 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

White corn meal
Forms the main body of the pones, giving them their structure and grainy texture.
Buttermilk
Adds moisture and mild acidity that works with the baking soda to lift the batter.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic buttermilk to produce gas, helping the pones rise and brown.
Melted fat
Adds richness and helps keep the pones tender and prevents sticking on the griddle.

The step that matters

Heating the griddle until smoking hot. The pan must be very hot before the pones go on so their surfaces set and brown quickly, instead of sticking or absorbing too much fat and steaming.

“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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