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Corn-meal Muffins

A quick batter of cornmeal, flour, baking powder, salt, sugar, eggs, butter, and milk baked into muffins.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Corn-meal Muffins

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.

Prepare the dry ingredients

  1. Sift the cornmeal and flour together in a bowl.

  2. Add baking powder, salt, and sugar, and sift again.

Make the batter

  1. In another bowl, beat the eggs until light.

  2. Stir melted butter and milk into the eggs.

  3. Gradually pour the wet mixture into the dry ingredients, beating hard for 5 minutes.

  4. Pour the batter into well-greased muffin tins.

Bake

  1. Bake at 400°F (200°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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + milktop 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

White cornmeal
Provides the main body and the characteristic grainy, crumbly texture of the muffins.
All-purpose flour
Adds gluten-forming structure that helps the muffins hold their shape.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking, lifting the batter so the muffins rise.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure and richness as they set in the oven.
Milk
Hydrates the dry ingredients and adds moisture and tenderness to the crumb.
Melted butter
Adds fat for richness, softness, and flavor in the finished muffins.

The step that matters

Beating the wet mixture into the dry ingredients. Beating hard for 5 minutes develops gluten in the flour, which can toughen the muffins. Mixing should be vigorous as written, but overbeating may make them dense, so watch the batter closely.

“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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