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Bread

Corn-meal-and-wheat Bread

A yeast‑leavened bread made with cornmeal, wheat flour, milk or water, sugar, and optional fat.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and wheat are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,418 recipes. Both carry (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal, which smells cucumber, melon. The science ↓

Corn-meal-and-wheat Bread

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the cornmeal mixture

  1. Pour 1½ cups of water over the cornmeal, salt, sugar, and fat (if used).

  2. Heat the mixture gradually to boiling and cook for 20 minutes in a double boiler.

  3. Allow the mixture to cool to room temperature.

Make and rise the dough

  1. Add the flour and yeast mixed with the remaining water.

  2. Knead thoroughly and let rise until it doubles in size.

Shape and bake

  1. Shape into a loaf and place in a pan.

  2. Allow to rise until nearly filling the pan.

  3. Bake at 350°F (175°C) for 45 to 50 minutes.

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 + wheattop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  2. Wheat + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,373 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Cornmeal
Gives the loaf a coarse, tender crumb and a distinct corn flavor.
Wheat flour
Forms the gluten network that traps gas and gives the loaf its structure.
Yeast
Produces carbon dioxide during fermentation, which makes the dough rise.
Milk
Adds richness, softness, and some browning from its milk sugars.

The step that matters

Cool the cornmeal mixture to room temperature before adding flour and yeast. Hot cornmeal mixture would kill or weaken the yeast, so the dough would fail to rise properly. Cooling first keeps the yeast alive and active.

“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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