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Dessert

Corn Meal Muffins with Rice

A quick muffin made with cornmeal, rice, milk, sugar, butter, flour, eggs, baking powder, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Corn and rice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 933 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Corn Meal Muffins with Rice

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a hot oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Make the batter

  1. Pour scalded milk over corn meal and let it stand for five minutes.

  2. Add hot rice and mix thoroughly with your fingers.

  3. Sift flour with salt and baking powder, then add to the mixture along with sugar and melted butter.

  4. Beat the egg yolk until light and add it to the mixture.

  5. Lastly, cut and fold in the beaten egg white.

Bake

  1. Bake in well buttered gill cups for twenty minutes at 400°F (200°C).

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. Corn + ricetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together933 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

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

  3. Milk + ricetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Milk + corntop 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

Corn meal
Provides the coarse, grainy texture and characteristic flavour of the muffins.
Egg
Adds structure and richness, with the whites beaten in to lighten the batter.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the muffins rise and become light.
Flour
Builds the structure that holds the muffins together as they set.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and flavour, and helps the cups brown at the edges.
Cooked rice
Adds moisture and a tender, soft crumb to the batter.

The step that matters

Fold in the beaten egg white. Cutting and folding rather than stirring keeps the air beaten into the egg white, which is what lightens the batter and helps the muffins rise.

“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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