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Bread

Spoon Bread

A quick cornmeal bread made with buttermilk, eggs, and butter, baked until set.

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

Spoon 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.

Make the batter

  1. Pour boiling water over the sifted cornmeal and stir well.

  2. Add the buttermilk, baking soda, salt, and beaten eggs. Mix thoroughly.

  3. Incorporate the butter into the mixture.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour the batter into a greased pan.

  2. Bake at 350°F (175°C) until set.

  3. Serve directly from the pan.

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

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Buttermilk + eggtop 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
Forms the body of the bread, giving it its coarse, tender crumb.
Buttermilk
Adds moisture and tang, and its acidity reacts with the baking soda to help it rise.
Eggs
Bind the batter and set during baking to give the bread its structure.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic buttermilk to produce gas that lightens the batter.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a softer, more tender texture.

The step that matters

Pour boiling water over the cornmeal. Scalding the cornmeal hydrates and softens its starch before the other ingredients are added, so the batter becomes smooth and the bread stays tender rather than 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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