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Dessert

Thin Corn Cake

Thin corn cake made with cornmeal, butter, water, salt, and sugar, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 118,967 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Thin Corn Cake

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 300°F (150°C).

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, combine cornmeal, salt, sugar, and boiling water. Beat rapidly.

  2. Add the butter and mix well.

Bake

  1. Spread the mixture very thin on buttered baking sheets.

  2. Bake for about 20 minutes until lightly golden.

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Cornmeal
Forms the main body of the flatbread and sets into a crisp, sturdy sheet as it bakes.
Boiling water
Hydrates the cornmeal and gelatinizes its starch so the batter becomes spreadable.
Butter
Adds fat for richer flavor and a more tender bite, and helps the sheets brown.
Sugar
Adds a touch of sweetness and helps the surface take on golden browning in the oven.

The step that matters

Spread the mixture very thin on buttered baking sheets.. Thin layers dry out and crisp evenly in the oven. Thick spots stay soft and bake unevenly, so the flatbread may not crisp through.

“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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