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Southern Hoe Cake

A Southern cornmeal cake cooked on a griddle, flavored with salt pork and topped with butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Pork and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 13,933 recipes. Both carry 2-furfurylthiol, which smells coffee, roasted. The science ↓

Southern Hoe Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. Combine cornmeal and salt in a bowl.

  2. Add boiling water to the mixture, stirring continuously until thick enough to hold shape.

Cook

  1. Grease a griddle with salt pork.

  2. Pour the batter onto the griddle to form a large round cake about 1 inch thick, smoothing the top.

  3. Cook slowly until one side is browned, then flip and brown the other side, adding a small lump of butter on top.

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. Pork + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,933 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

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

What each ingredient does

Cornmeal
Forms the body of the cake; boiling water hydrates it into a thick, shapeable batter.
Boiling water
Hydrates the cornmeal so starch gelatinises, binding the batter and giving it a soft interior.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the top, helping the surface brown and taste savoury.

The step that matters

Cooking the cake slowly. Cooking slowly lets the cake heat through to its centre before the outside browns too deeply. A fast, hot griddle can scorch the surface while the inside stays raw and gummy.

“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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