Name: Boston Brown Bread
Ingredients: 2 cups bread crumbs; 1 cup corn meal; ½ cup graham meal; 2 tablespoons molasses; 1 tablespoon salt; ½ teaspoon baking soda; 2 cups milk (or enough to make a rather thin batter)

Why it works: Corn and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,955 recipes. Both carry hexanal, which smells green, grassy. The science ↓

Boston Brown Bread

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

Soak the bread crumbs.
Rub the soaked bread crumbs through a colander.
In a bowl, combine the soaked bread crumbs, corn meal, graham meal, molasses, salt, and baking soda.
Add milk gradually to achieve a rather thin batter.

Steam and serve

Pour the mixture into a greased mold.
Steam for 4 hours.

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.

Corn + milktop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together6,955 recipes

Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).
Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together11,466 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).
Bread + corntop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together547 recipes

Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).
Molasses + milktop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together7,243 recipes

Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).
Corn + molassestop 26% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together644 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Bread crumbs: Soaked and pressed crumbs add moisture and a tender, soft crumb.
Corn meal: Gives the bread its coarse texture and characteristic flavour.
Graham meal: Adds a nutty, wholesome texture and a deeper brown colour.
Molasses: Adds sweetness, dark colour and moisture to the batter.
Baking soda: Reacts with the molasses's acidity to lighten the batter and help it rise.

The step that matters

Add milk gradually to achieve a rather thin batter. The batter must be thin enough to rise and set evenly while steaming. Adding all the milk at once makes it hard to judge the consistency, and a batter that is too thick can turn heavy and dense.

“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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Boston Brown Bread