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Southern Corn Bread or Spoon Bread

A quick baked cornbread made with milk, eggs, cornmeal, butter, salt, and baking powder.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter 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 ↓

Southern Corn Bread or Spoon Bread

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Boil the milk.

  2. Stir in the cornmeal and let it stand for a few minutes.

  3. Add the butter, beaten eggs, salt, and baking powder.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake in a greased pan for 20 to 30 minutes.

  2. Serve immediately.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Milk + eggtop 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
Provides the main structure and corn flavour of the bread.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure as they set during baking.
Milk
Hydrates the cornmeal and adds moisture to the batter.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and a richer flavour.
Baking powder
Releases gas that lifts the batter so the bread rises in the oven.

The step that matters

Stir in the cornmeal and let it stand. Cornmeal needs time to absorb the hot milk and swell. Resting lets the grains soften, which helps the bread hold together and keeps it from being gritty.

“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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