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Dessert

Spider Corn Cake

A sweet corn cake made with cornmeal, flour, milk, eggs, butter, and baking soda, baked after stovetop cooking.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Spider Corn Cake

Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Spider Corn Cake

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.

Make the batter

  1. Sift together cornmeal, flour, sugar, salt, and baking soda.

  2. Add ½ cup sweet milk and the beaten egg.

  3. Stir in sour milk and melted butter, mixing thoroughly.

Cook and bake

  1. Pour the mixture into a well-buttered skillet.

  2. Carefully pour ½ cup sweet milk over the top.

  3. Cook on the stovetop for 10 minutes, then bake in a 400°F (200°C) oven for 20 minutes.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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

Cornmeal
Forms the main body of the cake and gives it a coarse, crumbly texture.
Egg
Binds the batter and adds structure as it sets.
Sour milk
Its acidity reacts with the baking soda so the cake rises and turns tender.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic sour milk to produce gas that lifts the batter.
Melted butter
Adds fat for richness, moisture and a tender crumb.
Flour
Adds structure that holds the cake together alongside the cornmeal.

The step that matters

Cooking the stovetop and oven stages. Baking soda starts reacting as soon as the sour milk is added, so the batter should go into the skillet and into the oven promptly to trap the rising gas before it escapes.

“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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