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Corn Meal Muffins

A quick batter of corn meal, water, salt, sugar, eggs, and flour fried in lard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 Meal Muffins

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. Scald the corn meal with boiling water and allow it to cool.

  2. Add salt, sugar, beaten eggs, and flour to the cooled mixture.

Fry

  1. Drop spoonfuls of the batter into hot lard.

  2. Fry until 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 + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,165 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  5. Corn + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,168 recipes

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

Egg and flour 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 body of the muffins, and scalding it softens the grain for a tender crumb.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure as they set during frying.
Flour
Adds a little extra structure so the spoonfuls hold their shape in the hot fat.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the exterior brown in the hot lard.

The step that matters

Drop spoonfuls into hot lard. If the lard is not hot enough, the batter soaks up fat and turns greasy rather than crisping. Hot fat sets the outside quickly, so the muffins brown well and hold their shape.

“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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