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Preserve

Corn Dodgers

Corn Dodgers are fried balls made from a cornmeal and flour batter with egg, cooked in hot lard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Corn and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,165 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Corn Dodgers

Ingredients

Directions

Make the cornmeal mush

  1. Bring 3 pints of hot water to a boil in a pot.

  2. Add ¼ teaspoon of coarse sea salt.

  3. Gradually stir in corn meal until the mixture is smooth and thick like cake batter.

  4. Cook for 10-15 minutes, stirring continuously until well done.

Shape and fry

  1. In a large bowl, combine the cooked pudding with ½ cup of flour and 1 egg, mixing well with your hands.

  2. Wet your hands with cold water to prevent sticking, then shape the mixture into balls the size of eggs.

  3. Drop the balls into hot lard and fry for nearly 30 minutes until golden brown.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Corn + eggtop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,484 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

Flour and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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

Corn meal
Forms the thick body of the dodgers once cooked into a firm mush.
All-purpose flour
Adds starch and gives the cooked mush enough firmness to hold its shape.
Egg
Binds the mixture together so the balls hold their shape while frying.
Hot lard
Fries the outside until golden brown and crisp while the inside stays tender.

The step that matters

Cooking the mush until well done. Cornmeal starch must be fully cooked and thickened, or the dodgers stay pasty and fall apart in the hot fat. Stirring constantly prevents scorching and lumps.

“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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