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Dessert

Spider Cake

A cornmeal and wheat flour cake baked with eggs, milk, butter, and baking soda.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Spider Cake

Why it works: Milk and wheat are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,418 recipes. Both carry (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal, which smells cucumber, melon. The science ↓

Spider Cake

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.

Prepare

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

  2. Butter a skillet with a piece of butter the size of an egg.

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, mix together the cornmeal, wheat flour, salt, baking soda, and butter.

  2. Add the beaten eggs.

  3. Stir in 1 cup of sweet milk and the sour milk.

Bake

  1. Pour the mixture into the skillet.

  2. Add the remaining cup of sweet milk without stirring.

  3. Bake 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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + wheattop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Wheat + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,373 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Wheat + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

Cornmeal
Forms the main body and coarse, crumbly structure of the cake.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure as they set in the oven.
Sour milk
Its acidity reacts with the baking soda, helping the cake rise and tenderize.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the sour milk to release gas that lifts the batter.
Wheat flour
Adds structure and helps hold the cake together.
Butter
Adds fat for richer flavor and a tender texture.

The step that matters

Adding the remaining sweet milk without stirring. Leaving the milk unstirred keeps it as a separate layer on top of the batter, so it softens the surface and changes the final texture instead of mixing evenly through the cake.

“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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