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Dessert

Hominy Cakes

A batter of hominy, flour, salt, buttermilk, baking soda, and butter baked into cakes served with maple syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and buttermilk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,721 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Hominy Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Mix cold hominy and white flour until perfectly smooth.

  2. Add salt and thin the mixture with buttermilk in which baking soda has been dissolved.

  3. When the mixture is the consistency of griddle cakes, stir in melted butter.

Cook and serve

  1. Bake as usual.

  2. Serve with maple syrup.

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. Flour + buttermilktop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,721 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Buttermilk + buttertop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,674 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

Cold hominy
Provides the bulk and corn flavour that gives the cakes their body.
White flour
Its starch hydrates and sets during cooking, giving the cakes structure.
Buttermilk
Its acidity reacts with baking soda and thins the batter to a pourable consistency.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in buttermilk to release gas that lightens the cakes.
Melted butter
Adds fat that enriches the flavour and keeps the cakes tender.

The step that matters

Thinning to griddle-cake consistency. Flour starch absorbs liquid and sets when heated, so a batter that is too thick bakes dense while one that is too thin spreads and cooks unevenly. Judging the consistency before adding the butter gives the cakes their proper structure.

“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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