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Bread

Corn Bread

A quick baked bread made with corn meal, milk, eggs, sugar, butter, baking soda, baking powder, and lard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Corn Bread

Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Corn Bread

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Sweeten the milk with baking soda.

  3. Beat the eggs in a separate bowl.

  4. Pour the sweetened milk into the eggs and mix well.

  5. Gradually add the corn meal to thicken the mixture.

  6. Melt a piece of lard the size of an egg in a pan.

  7. Pour the melted lard into the batter and stir to combine.

  8. Add sugar, butter, baking powder, corn meal, and salt.

  9. Mix until the batter is quite stiff, adding flour as needed.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into a greased baking pan and bake 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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Corn + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,165 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + corntop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,345 recipes

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

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure as the cornbread sets.
Corn meal
Provides the main body and grainy texture of the cornbread.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking so the cornbread rises and becomes light.
Baking soda
Reacts with the milk and sweetens it, helping the cornbread rise and brown.
Butter
Adds fat for moisture, tenderness and flavor.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the crust brown.

The step that matters

Mix until the batter is quite stiff, adding flour as needed. Too much liquid or overmixing can make the cornbread dense and gummy. Stiffening the batter with flour gives it enough structure to hold its shape while 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.

More cornbread recipes

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