Skip to main content
Bread

New Orleans Corn Bread, Yeast-raised

A yeast-raised cornbread made with cornmeal, patent flour, lard, molasses, and water or milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

New Orleans Corn Bread, Yeast-raised

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.

Make the sponge

  1. Combine 1 pint of warm water, molasses, and yeast with a portion of the flour to create a sponge.

  2. Scald the cornmeal with 1 pint of boiling water to make a mush.

  3. Mix the lard and salt into the mush.

  4. Let the mush cool.

Mix and rise

  1. Add the mush and 1 pint of milk or water to the sponge, and mix to form a medium dough.

  2. Set the dough aside to rise until it doubles in size.

  3. Work the dough over.

Shape and bake

  1. Scale the dough, shape it into loaves, and place in pans for a second rise.

  2. Bake in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C) until golden.

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 + molassestop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,429 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Molasses + milktop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,243 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

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

White cornmeal
Gives the bread its corn flavor and a tender, crumbly texture when scalded into mush.
Patent flour
Forms the gluten network that gives the dough structure and lets it hold its rise.
Yeast
Ferments the sugars in the sponge, producing gas that makes the dough rise.
Lard
Adds fat that tenderizes the crumb and softens the texture.
Molasses
Feeds the yeast and adds sweetness, depth and browning to the crust.

The step that matters

Let the dough rise fully before shaping. Yeast needs time to produce enough gas to fill the gluten network. Shaping or baking before the dough doubles yields dense loaves with a poor crumb.

“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