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Baking

Corn Muffins

A baked cornmeal and wheat flour muffin with eggs, butter, baking soda, salt, and sweet milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Corn and wheat match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 465 recipes. Both carry hexanal, which smells green, grassy. The science ↓

Corn Muffins

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point. The book gives no cooking times either; the times in the steps were added in transcription, so check for doneness rather than trusting the clock.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

Make the batter

  1. In a large bowl, mix the corn meal, wheat flour, baking soda, and salt.

  2. In another bowl, cream the butter and add the beaten eggs.

  3. Combine the wet ingredients with the dry ingredients, then stir in the sweet milk.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into greased muffin tins and bake for 20-25 minutes or until golden.

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. Corn + wheattop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together465 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  2. Wheat + milktop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,418 recipes

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

  3. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  4. Corn + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Corn meal
Provides the main body and the characteristic grainy, golden structure of the muffins.
Wheat flour
Adds gluten-forming structure so the muffins hold together better than corn meal alone.
Eggs
Bind the batter and set during baking to give the muffins structure and richness.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic ingredients to produce gas that helps the muffins rise.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and flavour in the crumb.
Sweet milk
Adds moisture and hydrates the flours to form the batter.

The step that matters

Combine the wet and dry ingredients. Stir just until combined. Overmixing develops gluten in the wheat flour and can make the muffins tough, while the baking soda starts reacting as soon as it meets liquid, so the batter should go into the tins promptly.

“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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