Skip to main content
Bread

Salt Rising Bread

A bread that rises overnight from a cornmeal and milk mixture, then baked with lard and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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 ↓

Salt Rising Bread

Ingredients

Directions

Make the starter

  1. Stir 2 tablespoons of cornmeal, a pinch of coarse sea salt, and ½ teaspoon of sugar into 1 cup of hot milk. Let it stand overnight until it puffs up.

  2. Pour 1 teaspoon of sugar, 1 teaspoon of coarse sea salt, and 1 pint of hot water over the mixture.

  3. When cool, stir in the overnight mixture and enough flour to make a stiff batter.

  4. Beat the batter well and set it in a warm place.

  5. It should rise in about one hour.

Make the dough

  1. In a separate bowl, combine 1 quart of water, ½ cup of sugar, ½ cup of lard, and 1 scant tablespoon of coarse sea salt.

  2. Add the risen batter and enough flour to knead without sticking.

Bake

  1. Place the dough in pans, keep warm, and bake when light.

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. Milk + sugartop 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
Adds moisture and richness to the starter, helping it ferment and puff overnight.
Flour
Forms the gluten network that gives the batter and dough structure and chew.
Lard
Adds fat that tenderises the crumb and softens the texture.
Sugar
Feeds the starter's fermentation and adds mild sweetness and browning.

The step that matters

Keep the batter warm while it rises. Salt rising bread relies on slow fermentation by wild bacteria rather than yeast. Warm conditions let these organisms work steadily, so the batter rises properly before baking.

“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