Why it works: Butter and milk 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 ↓
Johnny Cakes
Ingredients
Directions
Make the batter
In a bowl, combine Indian meal, salt, and butter.
Pour in enough boiling water to create a stiff batter and stir well.
Let the mixture sit in a dish of boiling water for 3-4 minutes.
Thin the batter with sweet milk until it drops easily from a spoon.
Cook
Drop spoonfuls of the batter onto a hot, buttered griddle.
Cook until brown, then flip and brown the other side.
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.
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Butter + milktop 7% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together81,283 recipes
Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Indian meal
- Cornmeal forms the bulk of the cake and gives it its coarse, grainy texture.
- Boiling water
- Hydrates the cornmeal and gelatinizes its starch so the batter holds together.
- Sweet milk
- Thins the stiff batter to a pourable consistency and adds richness and browning.
- Butter
- Adds fat for flavour and helps the cakes brown and release from the griddle.
The step that matters
Thinning the batter with milk. The batter must be stiff enough to hold shape but thin enough to drop from a spoon. Too little milk leaves dense, dry cakes, while too much makes them spread and cook unevenly on the griddle.
“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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