Skip to main content
Bread

Corn and Flour Bread

A simple bread made from cornmeal, white flour, lard, yeast, molasses, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Molasses and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,429 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Corn and Flour Bread

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderately hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. Soak cornmeal in ½ cup warm water.

  2. Mix cornmeal, soaked water, and salt to make a mush; cook until very soft.

  3. Add lard, yeast, and molasses, then mix in enough white flour to form a stiff dough.

Rest and bake

  1. In the morning, work the dough again before baking.

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. Molasses + flourtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,429 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Cornmeal
Forms the base of the bread, giving it its corn flavor and coarse, tender crumb.
Yeast
Produces gas as it ferments, causing the dough to rise and become lighter.
Molasses
Adds sweetness and depth, and feeds the yeast during fermentation.
White flour
Provides gluten structure so the stiff dough holds its shape and traps gas.
Lard
Adds fat, which tenderizes the crumb and softens its texture.

The step that matters

Cooking the mush until very soft. Cooking cornmeal in liquid gelatinizes its starches, so the mush blends smoothly into the dough and keeps the bread moist. Undercooked cornmeal stays gritty and dense.

“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.

More cornbread recipes

Steamed 78Rye 18Southern 15Molasses 14Indian 11Virginia 11 See all 732 →

You might also like

Bread PuddingBread Pudding336 recipesMilk Bread RollsMilk Bread Rolls242 recipesPotato BreadPotato Bread124 recipesNut BreadNut Bread109 recipes