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Dessert

Spider Corn-cake

A corn cake made with cornmeal, flour, eggs, sweet and sour milk, sugar, baking soda, salt, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter 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 ↓

Spider Corn-cake

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a hot oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare

  1. Dissolve the baking soda in 1 cup of sweet milk.

  2. Beat the eggs until light.

  3. Heat a large frying pan and grease it with butter.

Make the batter

  1. Combine the dissolved soda milk and sour milk with the dry ingredients, then add the eggs.

  2. Pour the mixture into the pan and add the remaining cup of sweet milk without stirring.

Bake

  1. Bake in a hot oven at 400°F (200°C) for 20 to 25 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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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 of the cake and gives it a coarse, grainy texture.
All-purpose flour
Adds structure that helps the cake hold together after baking.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure and richness as they set in the oven.
Sour milk
Its acidity reacts with the baking soda and tenderizes the crumb.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the sour milk to release gas that makes the cake rise.
Butter
Greasing the pan adds fat that helps prevent sticking and browns the surface.

The step that matters

Adding the remaining sweet milk without stirring. Baking soda and acid release carbon dioxide bubbles that lift the batter. Stirring at this point would knock out those bubbles, so the cake would rise less and bake up denser.

“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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