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Corn Bread— Espetonga

A sweet potato and corn flour bread baked in a skillet.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Sweet potato and corn match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 153 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Corn Bread— Espetonga

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. Boil the sweet potatoes and rub them through a colander.

  2. Add the butter, baking soda, and egg; beat well.

  3. Mix in the corn flour and milk until combined.

Bake

  1. Pour into a deep buttered dish or skillet.

  2. Cover and bake over a fire until cooked through.

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. Sweet potato + corntop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together153 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Sweet potato + flourtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together627 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Corn + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Sweet potatoes
Provide moisture and body, giving the cornbread a soft, dense crumb.
Baking soda
Reacts with the batter's acidity to produce gas, helping the cornbread rise.
Egg
Binds the batter and adds structure as it cooks and sets.
Corn flour
Forms the main structure of the cornbread and gives it its characteristic corn flavor.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and richness, and helps keep the crumb moist.

The step that matters

Rubbing the sweet potatoes through a colander. Pushing the boiled potatoes through a colander gives a smooth purée with no lumps. Lumps can leave pockets in the batter and uneven texture in the baked cornbread.

Swap the sweet potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, corn, flour, egg, milk):

  1. Potatofits about as well
  2. Asparagusfits about as well
  3. Capsicumfits about as well
  4. Sweet potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, corn, flour, egg, milk. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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