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Dessert

Bread and Milk Muffins

A quick muffin made from bread crumbs, milk, eggs, and butter, baked on a griddle.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Bread and Milk Muffins

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pour boiling salted water over the bread crumbs and let them sit covered for 30 minutes.

  2. Drain off the liquid without pressing the crumbs.

  3. Beat in the flour.

Make the batter

  1. Add butter to the hot milk and mix in.

  2. Beat until smooth and nearly lukewarm before adding the eggs.

Cook and serve

  1. Bake in muffin rings on a hot griddle.

  2. Serve hot and tear open, do not cut.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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

Dry bread crumbs
Soak up liquid to form the soft, tender body of the muffin.
All-purpose flour
Thickens the batter and helps give the muffins structure.
Eggs
Bind the batter and set during cooking to hold the muffin together.
Milk
Adds moisture and richness, and its proteins help browning.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a tender crumb.

The step that matters

Beat until nearly lukewarm before adding the eggs. Adding eggs to very hot batter can start cooking them unevenly, leading to lumps and a less smooth, evenly set muffin. Cooling slightly lets the eggs blend in and set uniformly.

“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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