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Corn Meal Muffins

A quick baked cornmeal muffin made with cornmeal, flour, eggs, sugar, salt, baking powder, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,466 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

Corn Meal Muffins

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the batter

  1. Scald the cornmeal in a pot until it becomes mush.

  2. Allow the mush to cool, then add salt, sugar, and eggs.

  3. Mix in the bread flour and baking powder.

  4. Add milk gradually until the batter is the consistency of pancake batter.

Bake

  1. Grease muffin rings and fill each with batter.

  2. Bake in a preheated oven at 400°F (200°C) for 10 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. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  2. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, 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 main body of the muffin and gives them their coarse, tender crumb.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure as the muffins set in the oven.
Bread flour
Adds gluten-forming protein that helps the muffins hold their shape.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the muffins rise and become light.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the crust brown in the oven.

The step that matters

Add milk gradually until the batter is the consistency of pancake batter. Cornmeal absorbs liquid at different rates depending on how it was scalded and cooled. Adding milk slowly lets you judge the thickness and avoid a batter that is too stiff, which bakes up dense, or too thin, which spreads and does not hold its 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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