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Bread

Old Fashioned Corn Light Bread

A corn-based bread made from mush, lard, milk, meal, flour, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and flour 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 ↓

Old Fashioned Corn Light Bread

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the mush

  1. Make 3 cups of mush and add ½ teaspoon salt and 1 tablespoon melted lard.

  2. When the mixture is cool (not cold), stir in enough meal until it is thicker than egg bread.

  3. Set the mixture in a warm place to rise.

Make the bread

  1. Once it has risen, stir in 1 cup sweet milk, 1 cup meal, 1 cup Dainty flour, and 1 heaping tablespoon sugar.

  2. Pour the batter into a warm, well-greased pan and let it rise again.

  3. Bake until done, then roll in a cloth of several thicknesses to keep soft.

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. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Milk and flour 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

Mush
Forms the base of the batter and gives the bread its moist, tender body.
Meal
Adds corn structure and body so the batter is thick enough to hold its shape.
Dainty flour
Adds gluten-based structure to help the light bread hold its rise.
Sweet milk
Adds moisture and richness to the batter.
Lard
Adds fat for a tender crumb and softer texture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps browning in the baked crust.

The step that matters

Cool the mush before adding meal. If the mush is still hot, it can kill the yeast or leavening activity and thin the batter, while cold mush will not blend evenly and may stay stiff. Cooling to just warm lets the meal mix in smoothly and the batter rise properly.

“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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