Why it works: Pork and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 13,933 recipes. Both carry 2-furfurylthiol, which smells coffee, roasted. The science ↓
Hoe-cake
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the batter
Mix the cornmeal and salt in a bowl.
Add enough boiling water to moisten the meal and let it stand for 10 minutes.
Add more boiling water until the batter can drop from a spoon.
Bake and serve
Grease a hot griddle with fat from salt pork and bake the batter in cakes.
Top each cake with a piece of butter and serve.
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.
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Pork + buttertop 13% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together13,933 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).
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 cake, setting into a firm, crumbly texture as it cooks.
- Boiling water
- Hydrates the cornmeal so it forms a spoonable batter and cooks through.
- Fat from salt pork
- Greases the hot griddle and helps the outside of each cake brown.
- Butter
- Adds richness and flavour to each cake when it is served warm.
The step that matters
Add the boiling water gradually. Cornmeal absorbs water at different rates depending on how finely it is ground and how long it rests. Adding water in stages and letting the meal hydrate lets you reach a batter that drops from a spoon, rather than one that is too stiff or too runny to hold its shape on the griddle.
“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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