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Salt-rising Bread

A bread made with milk, cornmeal, salt, sugar, lard, and flour, risen overnight and baked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Salt-rising Bread

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderately quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a moderately quick oven”. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Make the starter

  1. Mix the salt and cornmeal in a bowl.

  2. Pour boiling milk over the mixture and stir until it thickens.

  3. Cover and let it rise overnight at room temperature.

  4. In the morning, add hot water to warm the mixture.

Make and bake the bread

  1. Stir in enough flour to make a thick dough, then add sugar and melted lard.

  2. Shape into loaves and let rise in a warm place until light.

  3. Bake in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C) until golden.

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 + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Milk
Its liquid and proteins make the starter thick and add softness and richness to the crumb.
Cornmeal
Its starches thicken with the boiling milk and feed the fermentation that leavens the loaves.
Flour
Its gluten forms the structure that holds the risen dough and gives the loaves their shape.
Lard
Its fat tenderises the crumb and adds moisture to the finished bread.
White sugar
Feeds the fermentation and adds a little sweetness and browning to the crust.

The step that matters

Pouring boiling milk over the cornmeal mixture. Boiling milk gelatinises the cornmeal starch so the mixture thickens into a stable base. Milk that is too cool leaves it thin, and the starter then ferments unevenly.

“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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