Skip to main content
Bread

Virginia Batter Bread

A batter bread made with cornmeal, butter, salt, baking soda, eggs, and sweet milk, baked until set.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and milk 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 ↓

Virginia Batter Bread

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. In a bowl, sift together the cornmeal, butter, salt, and baking soda.

  2. Pour boiling water over the mixture and stir until it resembles mush.

Mix and bake

  1. Beat in the eggs and thin the mixture with sweet milk.

  2. Pour into a pudding dish and bake for 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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 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 body of the batter, with its starch thickening into a mush when hot water is added.
Eggs
Bind the batter and set during baking to give it structure and lift.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and richness in the crumb.
Sweet milk
Adds moisture and thins the mush into a pourable batter.

The step that matters

Pouring boiling water over the cornmeal mixture. The hot water swells the cornmeal starch so the mixture thickens into a mush. Stirring until it is evenly wet prevents dry pockets and lumps, which would bake unevenly.

“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.

You might also like

CornbreadCornbread345 recipesBread PuddingBread Pudding336 recipesMilk Bread RollsMilk Bread Rolls242 recipesPotato BreadPotato Bread124 recipes