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Corn Meal Drop Cakes

A simple cornmeal batter dropped into a skillet and baked until brown.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 88,785 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Corn Meal Drop Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Scald the cornmeal in a pot.

  2. Stir in the lard until well combined.

  3. Let the mixture cool, then break in the eggs and stir.

  4. Add enough milk to create a thick batter.

Cook

  1. Grease a skillet or frying pan.

  2. Drop spoonfuls of the batter into the pan.

  3. Bake until brown.

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 + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Cornmeal
Forms the bulk of the batter and provides the cake's main body and corn flavour.
Eggs
Bind the batter and help set the cakes as they cook.
Lard
Adds fat for tenderness and a richer mouthfeel in the cakes.
Milk
Hydrates the cornmeal so the mixture forms a spoonable batter.

The step that matters

Scald the cornmeal. Scalding with hot liquid or steam swells the starch in the cornmeal, which softens its texture and helps the cakes hold together.

“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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