Why it works: Corn and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,345 recipes. Both carry 2,3-pentanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓
Corn Meal Cakes
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the dough
In a bowl, combine corn meal and salt.
Pour enough scalding water to form a stiff dough.
Shape and fry
Wet your hands and shape the dough into cakes.
Fry the cakes in heated lard, turning to brown both sides.
Serve
Split the cakes and spread with butter.
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.
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Corn + buttertop 14% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together7,345 recipes
Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).
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 structure of the cakes when hydrated with hot water.
- Scalding water
- Hydrates and gelatinizes the corn meal so it forms a workable, stiff dough.
- Lard
- Conducts heat for frying and promotes browning on the cakes' surfaces.
The step that matters
Pour enough scalding water to form a stiff dough. Corn meal absorbs water unevenly, so adding too little leaves dry, crumbly cakes that will not hold their shape, while too much makes the dough slack and hard to shape. Hot water partly gelatinizes the starch, which helps the dough bind.
“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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