Name: Kentucky Corn Egg-bread
Ingredients: 1 ½ pints cornmeal; 1 pint buttermilk; 1 egg; 1 teaspoon baking soda; 1 teaspoon salt; 1 tablespoon lard

Why it works: Buttermilk and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 25% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,986 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Kentucky Corn Egg-bread

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.

Prepare

Preheat your oven to 400°F (200°C).

Make and bake

In a large bowl, mix the cornmeal, buttermilk, egg, baking soda, salt, and lard until well combined.
Pour the mixture into a greased baking dish.
Bake in the preheated oven until golden brown.

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.

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

Cornmeal: Forms the bulk of the batter and gives the cornbread its structure and grainy texture.
Buttermilk: Adds moisture and acidity that tenderises the crumb and reacts with the baking soda.
Egg: Binds the batter and helps set the crumb as it bakes.
Baking soda: Reacts with the acidic buttermilk to produce gas that lifts the batter.
Lard: Adds fat for tenderness and helps the crust brown.

“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.