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Indian Corn Muffins

A quick batter of flour, milk, Indian corn, baking powder, salt, and butter baked into muffins.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter 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 ↓

Indian Corn Muffins

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Mix the salt and baking powder with the flour.

  2. Pour in the warm milk and mix well.

  3. Add enough ground Indian corn to make a thin batter.

Rest and add butter

  1. Let the batter rest for 3 hours.

  2. Add the melted butter and mix.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into muffin tins and bake.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + corntop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,165 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Corn + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,345 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Flour
Provides the main structure that holds the muffins together as they set.
Ground indian corn
Adds corn flavor and a coarser, tender texture to the crumb.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the wet batter so the muffins rise in the oven.
Warm milk
Moistens the flour and corn so they form a batter and help set the crumb.
Melted butter
Adds fat that tenderizes the crumb and carries flavor.

The step that matters

Resting the batter for 3 hours. Baking powder starts releasing gas as soon as it gets wet, so a long rest can use up some of its lifting power before baking. Mixing the batter and baking it soon after helps keep the rise strong.

“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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