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Eye Bread

A bread made with cornmeal, rye flour, yeast, and warm water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Eye Bread

Why it works: Rye and corn work together. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 182 recipes. Both carry acetic acid, which smells sour, vinegar. The science ↓

Eye Bread

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sponge

  1. Mix warm water and yeast to make a sponge.

  2. Thicken the sponge with rye flour.

  3. Place the sponge in a warm place to rise overnight.

Make the dough

  1. Scald corn meal.

  2. Let scalded corn meal cool.

  3. Add cooled corn meal to the sponge.

  4. Mix in rye flour until thick enough to knead.

  5. Knead dough lightly.

  6. Let dough rise.

Shape and bake

  1. Shape dough into loaves.

  2. Place loaves in deep pie-tins or small pudding-pans.

  3. Let loaves rise again.

  4. Bake loaves.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Rye + corntop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together182 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  2. Rye + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,320 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Tea + corntop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together89 recipes

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

  4. Flour + corntop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,165 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Tea + ryetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Yeast
Ferments the sponge, producing gas that makes the dough rise.
Rye flour
Thickens the sponge and adds structure so the dough can be kneaded.
Corn meal
Forms the bulk of the loaf, giving it its corn flavor and a coarser crumb.
Warm water
Hydrates the flour and corn meal and activates the yeast.

The step that matters

Let the scalded corn meal cool before adding it to the sponge. Hot corn meal would kill the yeast in the sponge, so the dough would fail to 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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