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Breakfast Corn Cake

A sweet cornmeal cake made with butter, sugar, eggs, milk, flour, baking soda, cream of tartar, and egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk 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 ↓

Breakfast Corn Cake

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the batter

  1. Cream the butter in a mixing bowl.

  2. Beat in the sugar, egg yolks, and milk until well combined.

  3. In a separate bowl, sift together the cornmeal, flour, baking soda, and cream of tartar.

  4. Gradually add the dry ingredients to the wet mixture, stirring until smooth.

  5. Fold in the beaten egg whites gently.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into a greased baking dish.

  2. Bake at 350°F (175°C) until golden.

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

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

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Butter
Adds richness and tenderness by coating flour particles and carrying flavour.
Egg whites
Beaten whites trap air, lifting the batter and giving a lighter crumb.
Egg yolks
Add richness, colour and emulsifying power that holds the batter together.
Cornmeal
Gives the cake its coarse texture, golden colour and corn flavour.
All-purpose flour
Provides the main structure that holds the cake together as it bakes.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the cream of tartar to produce gas that makes the cake rise.

The step that matters

Fold in the beaten egg whites gently. Over-mixing knocks out the air trapped in the whites, so the cake rises less and turns dense. Gentle folding keeps the batter light.

“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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