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Dessert

Sour Milk Corn Cake

A sweet cake made with flour, cornmeal, eggs, sour milk, butter, sugar, baking soda, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Sour Milk Corn Cake

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Sift together the flour, cornmeal, salt, baking soda, and sugar.

  2. Add the sour milk, well-beaten eggs, and melted butter. Mix until combined.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour the batter into a shallow cake pan.

  2. Bake until golden and cut into squares.

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

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

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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
Provides the coarse, grainy body and characteristic corn flavour of the cake.
Flour
Adds structure so the batter holds together when baked.
Eggs
Bind the batter and help set the crumb as it bakes.
Sour milk
Its acidity reacts with the baking soda so the cake rises and softens.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic sour milk to produce gas that lifts the batter.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture, tenderising the crumb.

The step that matters

Mixing the sour milk with the baking soda. Baking soda needs an acid to activate and release gas. Adding the sour milk to the dry ingredients and mixing only until combined keeps that gas in the batter, so the cake rises well and stays tender rather than tough.

“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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