Skip to main content
Dessert

Huckleberry Corn Cakes

A cornmeal cake flavored with huckleberries, baked to a half‑inch thickness.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Corn and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,955 recipes. Both carry hexanal, which smells green, grassy. The science ↓

Huckleberry Corn Cakes

Oven, in the book's wordsA steady oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Scald the corn meal with boiling water.

  2. Add flour and enough milk to make a thick batter.

  3. Mix in baking powder and brown sugar.

  4. Fold in huckleberries gently.

Cook

  1. Bake on a griddle, in muffin rings, or in the oven, making them ½ inch thick.

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 + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Milk + sugartop 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

Corn meal
Forms the body of the cakes and gives them their coarse, grainy texture.
Flour
Adds structure so the thick batter holds together while cooking.
Baking powder
Releases gas that lifts the batter so the cakes rise and turn light.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and moisture, and helps the cakes brown.
Huckleberries
Add tart, juicy fruit flavor and pockets of moisture throughout the cakes.

The step that matters

Folding in the huckleberries gently. Vigorous stirring breaks the berries and turns the batter purple, while overworking a batter that contains baking powder knocks out gas bubbles and weakens the rise. Gentle folding keeps the berries whole and the cakes light.

“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.

You might also like

Corn CakeCorn Cake90 recipesCorn Starch CakeCorn Starch Cake89 recipesCorn CakesCorn Cakes22 recipesGreen Corn PuddingGreen Corn Pudding14 recipes