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Dessert

Corn Pone or Corn Ball

A quick baked corn dough cake made with cornmeal, water, salt, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Corn and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,345 recipes. Both carry 2,3-pentanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Corn Pone or Corn Ball

Oven, in the book's wordsA very hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a very hot oven”. The 400°F in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Make the dough

  1. Mix corn meal with cold water to form a soft dough.

  2. Add salt and melted butter, and mix well.

Shape and bake

  1. Shape the mixture into oval cakes using your hands.

  2. Bake in a well-greased pan in a very hot oven (400°F / 200°C) until golden.

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. Corn + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,345 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Corn meal
Forms the body of the dough and gives the cakes their characteristic grainy structure.
Cold water
Hydrates the corn meal so it binds into a soft, shapeable dough.
Melted butter
Adds fat for flavour and a tender texture, and helps the crust brown.

The step that matters

Bake in a very hot oven until golden. Corn meal dough has no gluten to trap steam, so a very hot oven sets the outside quickly and browns it before the centre dries out. Too low a temperature produces pale, dense cakes.

“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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