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Corn Batter Cakes

A batter made from buttermilk, sweet milk, egg, wheat flour, salt, baking soda, and corn meal, cooked on a griddle.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Wheat and corn 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 Batter Cakes

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Mix buttermilk and sweet milk together.

  2. Add the egg, wheat flour, salt, and baking soda.

  3. Stir in enough corn meal to make a batter.

Cook

  1. Cook on a hot griddle 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.

  1. Wheat + corntop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together465 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  2. Milk + wheattop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,418 recipes

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

  3. Buttermilk + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,721 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Milk + corntop 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

Buttermilk
Adds acidity that reacts with baking soda so the cakes rise and stay tender.
Egg
Binds the batter and adds structure as it sets on the griddle.
Wheat flour
Provides gluten and starch that give the cakes body alongside the cornmeal.
Baking soda
Reacts with the buttermilk's acid to produce gas that leavens the cakes.
Corn meal
Supplies the main corn flavor and a slightly grainy texture to the cakes.

The step that matters

Cook on a hot griddle until golden brown. A griddle that is too cool lets the batter spread and absorb grease without setting, while the leavening gas escapes. A properly hot surface sets the outside quickly and browns it through the Maillard reaction.

“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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