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Corn Griddle Cakes

A griddle cake made with cornmeal, flour, baking powder, and milk, cooked on a griddle.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Corn Griddle Cakes

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Add cornmeal to boiling water and boil for five minutes.

  2. Transfer to a bowl, then add milk and sifted dry ingredients.

  3. Add the beaten egg and melted butter, mixing well.

Cook

  1. Cook on a griddle like other griddle cakes.

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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 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. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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 as its proteins and starches set around the air and liquid.
Cornmeal
Gives the pancakes a coarser, more tender texture and a grainy bite.
Baking powder
Releases gas when moistened and heated, lifting the batter so the pancakes rise.
Egg
Binds the batter and adds richness and structure as it sets on the griddle.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and a rich flavor, and helps keep the pancakes from drying out.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the surface brown during cooking.

The step that matters

Boil the cornmeal in water for the full five minutes. Boiling cornmeal in water gelatinizes its starch, softening the grain and giving the batter a cohesive, tender body. Cutting the boil short can leave the pancakes gritty.

“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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