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Corn Dodgers

A fried corn dough ball made from cornmeal, flour, egg, and lard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 106,462 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Corn Dodgers

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

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

  2. Add ¼ teaspoon salt and cornmeal until the mixture is smooth and thick like cake batter.

  3. Cook for 10 to 15 minutes, stirring continuously until well done.

  4. Once cool, mix in ½ cup flour and 1 egg using your hands.

Shape and fry

  1. Mould the mixture into round balls the size of an egg, wetting your hands with cold water to prevent sticking.

  2. Drop the balls into hot lard and fry for nearly 30 minutes.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, 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

Cornmeal
Thickens the water into a batter-like dough that holds its shape when cooked.
Flour
Adds body to the cooled dough so it binds and holds together for shaping.
Egg
Binds the dough and adds richness and structure as it sets.
Hot lard
Fries the outside of the dough balls, giving them browning and a crisp crust.

The step that matters

Cook the dough until well done. Cornmeal starches must be fully cooked in hot water to swell and set; undercooked cornmeal stays gritty and makes the dough soft and hard to shape.

“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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