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Hoe-cake

A cornmeal cake made by mixing cornmeal with salt, adding boiling water, cooking on a griddle greased with fat salt pork, served 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 ↓

Hoe-cake

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, mix the cornmeal with the salt.

  2. Add enough boiling water to just moisten the meal and let it stand for 10 minutes.

  3. Add more boiling water until the batter can drop from a spoon.

Cook and serve

  1. Grease a hot griddle with a piece of fat salt pork.

  2. Bake the batter in cakes on the griddle.

  3. Once done, place a piece of butter on top of each cake and serve.

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 cakes, setting into a firm, grainy crumb when cooked.
Boiling water
Hydrates the cornmeal, turning it into a batter that holds its shape and cooks through.

The step that matters

Letting the meal stand after the first water addition. Cornmeal needs time to absorb moisture before more water is added. Resting lets the starch swell evenly, so the batter reaches the right consistency without becoming thin or lumpy.

“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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