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Salt Rising Bread

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Milk and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Salt Rising Bread

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a quart bowl, mix cornmeal and baking soda.

  2. Boil milk and water, then pour over the cornmeal mixture, stirring to avoid lumps.

  3. Cover the bowl and let it rise in a warm place for 12 to 15 hours.

  4. Once risen, add flour and yeast mixture, stirring well.

  5. Add 1¼ pints of warm water to make a thick batter.

  6. Cover and let it rise again in a warm place for about 1 hour.

  7. Mix in salt, sugar, lard, and enough flour to form a firm dough.

  8. Shape into loaves and place in a pan.

  9. Let rise again in a warm place with hot water underneath for 20 to 30 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. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Milk and flour 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

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