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Soft Batter Bread

A batter bread made with eggs, buttermilk, cornmeal, baking soda, salt, and butter, baked in a greased bowl.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Soft Batter Bread

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Grease a bowl.

Mix the batter

  1. In a mixing bowl, combine the beaten eggs and buttermilk.

  2. Add baking soda, salt, and enough cornmeal to create a thin batter.

  3. Stir in the melted butter.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour the batter into the greased bowl.

  2. Bake until set.

  3. Serve directly from the bowl.

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. Egg + buttermilktop 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

Eggs
Bind the batter and help it set firm when baked.
Buttermilk
Adds moisture and tang, and reacts with baking soda to help the bread rise.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic buttermilk to produce gas, lifting the batter as it bakes.
Cornmeal
Provides the body and grainy structure of the bread once it is baked.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, contributing to tenderness and flavor.

The step that matters

Adding the baking soda to the buttermilk batter. Baking soda needs an acid, such as buttermilk, to react and release gas. Once the batter is mixed, the gas begins to form, so it should go into the oven promptly to rise well and avoid a flat, dense loaf.

“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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