Skip to main content
Bread

Rye and Indian Meal, Bread of

A bread made from cornmeal, rye flour, yeast, and water, baked in an oven.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Rye and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,320 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Rye and Indian Meal, Bread of

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. In a glazed earthen pan, sprinkle salt over the cornmeal.

  2. Pour boiling water over the cornmeal and mix until thoroughly wet.

  3. When the mixture is lukewarm, add rye flour and yeast mixed in warm water.

  4. Work the dough until stiff but not as stiff as regular flour dough.

Rise and bake

  1. Place the dough in a greased deep pan and pat down the top with a wet hand.

  2. Let it rise in a warm place until it begins to crack on top, about 1 to 1.5 hours.

  3. Preheat the oven and bake the bread for 2 to 3 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.

  1. Rye + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,320 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Cornmeal
Forms the bulk of the loaf and, once soaked in boiling water, gives a dense, moist crumb.
Rye flour
Adds gluten-forming protein and flavor, helping the dough hold its shape while it rises.
Active dry yeast
Produces gas that lifts the dough during rising, giving the loaf some lightness.

The step that matters

Working the dough to the right stiffness. Cornmeal absorbs water slowly and gluten from rye is limited, so dough that is too wet will spread and collapse, while dough that is too stiff will bake dense and dry.

“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.

You might also like

CornbreadCornbread345 recipesBread PuddingBread Pudding336 recipesMilk Bread RollsMilk Bread Rolls242 recipesPotato BreadPotato Bread124 recipes