Name: Corn Pone
Ingredients: ½ pint cornmeal (white); ⅔ cup sweet milk; ⅔ cup sour milk; 1 teaspoon baking soda; 3 eggs; 2 tablespoons lard

Why it works: Milk and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 88,785 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Corn Pone

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Melt the lard.
Beat the eggs until very light.

Make the batter

Combine cornmeal, sweet milk, sour milk, and baking soda in a bowl.
Add the melted lard and beaten eggs to the mixture.

Bake

Pour the batter into pans and bake 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.

Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together88,785 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Cornmeal: Forms the main body of the bread, giving it its grainy structure.
Eggs: Bind the batter and add structure and richness as they set in the oven.
Sour milk: Its acidity reacts with the baking soda to produce gas, helping the pone rise.
Baking soda: Reacts with the acid in the sour milk to release carbon dioxide for lift.
Lard: Adds fat that tenderizes the crumb and helps the crust brown.
Sweet milk: Adds moisture and softness to the batter.

“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.