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Dessert

Tea Rolls

A sweet yeast roll made with milk, butter, sugar, egg, yeast, and flour, topped with a sugar glaze.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Tea Rolls

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Boil the sweet milk.

  2. Pour the hot milk over the butter and sugar.

  3. Let the mixture cool.

  4. Add the beaten egg and dissolved yeast.

  5. Mix in enough flour to form a batter.

  6. Let the batter rise overnight.

Shape and bake

  1. In the morning, mix the batter as bread.

  2. Let it rise until light.

  3. Put the dough in tins and let it rise again.

  4. Bake until golden, then moisten the top with sugar dissolved in hot water.

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

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

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour 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

Yeast
Produces gas that makes the dough rise and become light.
Egg
Adds structure and richness to the dough as it sets.
Butter
Adds fat for a tender crumb and soft texture.
Flour
Forms the batter and gives the dough its structure.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast and adds sweetness and browning to the crust.

The step that matters

Let the batter rise overnight. The yeast needs time to ferment and build gas and flavour; rising too short or too long affects lightness and texture of the finished roll.

“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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