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Bread

Pan Bread

Pan Bread is a batter bread made with buttermilk, cornmeal, eggs, soda, and salt, baked in an earthenware pan or on a griddle.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 118,967 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Pan Bread

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Beat the eggs until very light.

  2. Add buttermilk, cornmeal, salt, and soda to the eggs.

  3. Mix in hot water until you reach the desired consistency.

  4. If using clabber or sour milk, add a little lard or butter.

Bake

  1. Bake in an earthenware pan or on a griddle as batter cakes.

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Buttermilk + buttertop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,674 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Buttermilk + eggtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,986 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Beaten until light, they add structure and lift to the batter.
Buttermilk
Its acidity reacts with the soda to help the bread rise and adds tang.
Cornmeal
Forms the body of the bread, giving it its grainy texture.
Soda
Reacts with the acid in the buttermilk to produce gas that leavens the bread.

The step that matters

Adding the hot water. Hot water is stirred in last to reach the right consistency. Too much thins the batter and weakens its structure, while too little leaves the cornmeal dry and dense.

“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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