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Baking

Corn Dodgers

A baked cornmeal cake made with lard, salt, eggs, and boiling water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Corn and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,484 recipes. Both carry (e)-2-octenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Corn Dodgers

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a hot oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare the batter

  1. In a bowl, combine lard and salt with corn meal.

  2. Pour enough boiling water to make a very stiff mush and set aside to cool.

  3. Once lukewarm, add the well-beaten eggs and mix well.

Bake

  1. Drop spoonfuls of the mixture onto a greased baking pan.

  2. Bake in a hot oven at 400°F (200°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. Corn + eggtop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,484 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Corn meal
Forms the main body of the dodgers, giving them their grainy structure.
Eggs
Bind the stiff mush and add richness and structure as the dodgers set.
Lard
Adds fat for tenderness and a richer flavor in the finished dodgers.

The step that matters

Let the mush cool to lukewarm before adding the eggs. Boiling-hot mush would partly cook the eggs and scramble them unevenly, so the batter would not blend smoothly or bind well. Cooling it first keeps the eggs fluid enough to mix in evenly.

“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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