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Baking

Corn Meal Drop Cakes

A simple batter of cornmeal, lard, eggs, milk, and optional salt, fried into drop cakes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 88,785 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Corn Meal Drop Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Scald the cornmeal in a pot.

  2. Stir in the lard until well combined.

  3. Let the mixture cool, then break in the eggs and mix well.

  4. Add enough milk to create a thick batter.

Cook

  1. Grease a skillet or frying pan.

  2. Drop spoonfuls of the batter into the pan and bake until brown.

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. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, 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 batter and provides the cake's grainy, sturdy structure.
Eggs
Bind the batter and help hold the cakes together as they set.
Lard
Adds fat for tenderness and richness in the cakes.
Milk
Adds moisture so the cornmeal forms a thick, spoonable batter.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool before adding the eggs. Eggs added to a hot mixture can scramble or cook unevenly instead of blending smoothly into the batter. Cooling first keeps the batter smooth and lets the eggs bind it properly.

“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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