Skip to main content
Dessert

Corn Batter-Cakes

A batter of cornmeal, water, milk, eggs, and salt cooked on a greased griddle.

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

Why it works: Milk and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 88,785 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Corn Batter-Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, combine ¼ pint of cornmeal and salt.

  2. Pour boiling water over the mixture and stir until smooth.

  3. Add sweet milk and beaten eggs, mixing well.

  4. Gradually stir in the remaining cornmeal, mashing any lumps.

Cook the cakes

  1. Heat the griddle until it smokes, then grease it with a cloth dipped in grease.

  2. Stir the batter again and pour one spoonful onto the griddle for each cake.

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 + eggtop 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 cakes and gives them their grainy texture.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure as the cakes set on the griddle.
Sweet milk
Adds moisture and softness, loosening the batter into a pourable consistency.

The step that matters

Stir the batter again before pouring. Cornmeal is coarse and settles quickly, so without restirring each cake would get a different amount of grain and liquid, leading to uneven texture and browning.

“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.

More cornmeal cakes recipes

Fried 4Hominy 4Indian 3 See all 85 →

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes