Why it works: Corn and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,345 recipes. Both carry 2,3-pentanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓
Hoe-cakes
Ingredients
Directions
Make the batter
In a bowl, mix cornmeal and salt.
Add enough boiling water to moisten the meal and let it stand for 10 minutes.
Add more boiling water until the batter can drop from a spoon.
Cook and serve
Grease a hot griddle with lard and bake the batter in cakes.
Once done, place a piece of butter on top of each cake and serve.
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.
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Corn + buttertop 14% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together7,345 recipes
Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Corn meal
- Forms the main body of the cakes, setting into a sturdy, grainy texture when cooked.
- Boiling water
- Hydrates the cornmeal so it becomes a spoonable batter and cooks into a tender crumb.
- Lard
- Greases the hot griddle and helps the outside of each cake brown and crisp.
The step that matters
Adding the boiling water gradually. Cornmeal absorbs water at different rates depending on how finely it is ground. Adding too much water at once makes the batter loose and hard to shape, while too little leaves it stiff. Adding it in stages and resting the meal lets the grains swell so you can reach a batter that drops from a spoon.
“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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