Skip to main content
Bread

Milk Sponge Bread

Milk Sponge Bread is a bread made from cornmeal, milk, sugar, salt, baking soda, water, flour, and shortening.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Milk and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Milk Sponge Bread

Oven, in the book's wordsA good oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a good oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Make the sponge

  1. Scald cornmeal, salt, and sugar with enough milk to make a mush; set aside in a warm place overnight.

  2. Scald sugar, salt, and baking soda with boiling water; add cold water until lukewarm.

  3. Thicken the mixture with flour to create a thick batter; stir in the mush from the night before for 1–2 minutes.

  4. Place the mixture in a close vessel in a kettle of warm water, ensuring the water is not too hot.

Shape and bake

  1. When the mixture is light, mix in enough flour to make a stiff dough; add a little shortening and mold into loaves.

  2. Bake in a good oven at 400 °F (200 °C) for 25–30 minutes.

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. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Milk
Moistens the cornmeal mush, giving the sponge its softness and helping it ferment.
Flour
Builds the batter and then the stiff dough, providing the structure that holds the loaves.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic sponge to release gas, helping the dough rise and turn light.
Cornmeal
Adds coarse texture and corn flavor to the mush that starts the sponge.

The step that matters

Keeping the sponge warm, not hot. The sponge must rise slowly by fermentation and gas release. Water that is too hot can kill the yeast-like activity and stall the rise, while cool conditions slow it too much, so the water should stay only warm.

“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

CornbreadCornbread345 recipesBread PuddingBread Pudding336 recipesMilk Bread RollsMilk Bread Rolls242 recipesPotato BreadPotato Bread124 recipes