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Dessert

Marcellus's Corn Muffins

A quick baked corn muffin made with buttermilk, cornmeal, baking soda, salt, egg, and melted lard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Buttermilk and corn work together. They rank in the top 24% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 226 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Marcellus's Corn Muffins

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat your oven to 400°F (200°C) and grease muffin rings.

  2. In a bowl, beat the egg.

Make the batter

  1. Add baking soda to the buttermilk and mix well.

  2. Combine the buttermilk mixture with the beaten egg and melted lard.

  3. Fill the greased muffin rings half full with the batter.

Bake

  1. Bake until golden brown.

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. Buttermilk + corntop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together226 recipes

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

  2. Buttermilk + eggtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,986 recipes

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

  3. 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

Buttermilk
Provides acidity that reacts with the baking soda to lift the batter and adds moisture.
Corn meal
Forms the main structure and gives the muffins their characteristic corn flavor and texture.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic buttermilk to release carbon dioxide, helping the muffins rise.
Egg
Binds the batter and adds structure and richness as it sets during baking.
Lard
Adds fat for tenderness and helps the muffins brown in the oven.

The step that matters

Add baking soda to the buttermilk and mix well. Baking soda reacts with the acid in buttermilk right away, releasing gas that leavens the batter. Delaying the bake or letting the batter stand can lose that lift, so the batter should go into the rings promptly.

“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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