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Bread

Southern Soft Batter Bread

A cornmeal-based bread made with buttermilk, sweet milk, egg, baking soda, salt, and butter, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Southern Soft Batter Bread

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point. The book gives no cooking times either; the times in the steps were added in transcription, so check for doneness rather than trusting the clock.

Prepare

  1. Preheat your oven to 350°F (175°C).

Make the batter

  1. In a large bowl, mix the cornmeal, baking soda, and salt.

  2. In another bowl, whisk together the buttermilk, sweet milk, and egg.

  3. Combine the wet ingredients with the dry ingredients and mix well.

  4. Melt the butter and stir it into the batter.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into a greased baking dish.

  2. Bake for 30-40 minutes or until golden brown.

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. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

  4. Buttermilk + buttertop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,674 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Egg + buttermilktop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,986 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Cornmeal
Provides the main structure and the grainy, crumbly body of the bread.
Egg
Binds the batter and helps set the bread as it bakes.
Buttermilk
Adds moisture and tang, and reacts with baking soda to help the bread rise.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic buttermilk to produce gas that lightens the batter.
Butter
Adds fat for richer flavor and a tender crumb.

The step that matters

Combine the wet and dry ingredients and mix well. Baking soda starts reacting as soon as it meets the acidic buttermilk, so the batter should go into the dish and oven promptly to trap the gas before it escapes. Mixing too long can also develop gluten and toughen the bread.

“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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