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Bread

Terhune Corn Bread

A cornmeal and flour bread baked in a pudding mold using sour milk or buttermilk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and milk 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 ↓

Terhune Corn Bread

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. Sift the cornmeal, flour, baking soda, and salt into a bowl.

  2. In another bowl, beat the lard and sugar together, then stir in the sour milk.

  3. Make a well in the center of the dry ingredients and pour in the milk mixture.

  4. Stir gradually to form a smooth batter, beating hard for 2 minutes.

Steam and serve

  1. Pour the batter into a greased pudding mold.

  2. Set the mold in a pot of boiling water and cook for 4 hours, keeping the water at a slow boil.

  3. Turn out the bread and serve hot.

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 + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Flour and milk 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

White cornmeal
Forms the bulk of the bread and gives it its coarse, crumbly corn texture.
All-purpose flour
Adds gluten-based structure so the bread holds together rather than crumbling.
Sour milk or buttermilk
Its acidity reacts with the baking soda to produce gas that lifts the batter.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic milk to leaven the batter and help it rise.
Lard
Adds fat for tenderness and a richer mouthfeel in the crumb.

The step that matters

Keeping the water at a slow boil. The bread cooks by steam over a very long time. If the water drops too low the mold cools and cooking stalls, while a hard rolling boil can make the water splash into the mold or push the crumb to uneven texture.

“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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