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Eggless Corn Bread

A quick, eggless corn bread made with flour, cornmeal, baking powder, melted fat, sugar, milk, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and milk 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 ↓

Eggless Corn 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.

Make the batter

  1. Sift together flour, cornmeal, sugar, salt, and baking powder.

  2. Add melted fat and milk, then beat hard for one minute.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour into a well-greased pan or corn stick pans.

  2. Bake at 400°F (200°C) until golden brown.

  3. Serve hot.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Flour and milk 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

Flour
Provides the main structure that holds the cornbread together as it sets.
Cornmeal
Gives the cornbread its characteristic grainy texture and corn flavour.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, causing the cornbread to rise and become light.
Melted fat
Adds richness and tenderness, helping the crumb feel soft rather than dry.
Sweet milk
Adds moisture and hydrates the flour and cornmeal so the batter can set.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the crust brown during baking.

The step that matters

Beat hard for one minute. Beating after adding the liquid develops gluten in the flour, which gives a firmer, more bread-like structure. Because the batter is eggless, little else holds it together, so the timing matters.

“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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