Skip to main content
Main

Rye and Indian Bread

A steamed bread made from cornmeal and rye flour, then browned in the oven.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Rye and Indian Bread

Why it works: Flour and raisin match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Rye and Indian Bread

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Mix cornmeal and rye flour together.

  2. Pour enough boiling water to wet the mixture.

  3. Pack the mixture into a pan.

Steam and brown

  1. Steam for 5 to 6 hours.

  2. Transfer to the oven to 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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Rye + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,320 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Rye + raisintop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

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 loaf and gives it its coarse, crumbly structure.
Rye flour
Adds some gluten-like structure and a deeper, earthy flavour to the loaf.
Boiling water
Hydrates the grains and starches so the mixture binds and cooks through during steaming.

The step that matters

Wet the mixture evenly with boiling water. Cornmeal and rye absorb water unevenly if it is poured unevenly, leaving dry pockets or soggy patches. Even hydration lets the starches gelatinize and the loaf hold together through the long steam.

“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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes