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Bread Feom Milk Yeast

A quick bread made with cornmeal, baking soda, salt, milk, and water, baked after rising.

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 ↓

Bread Feom Milk Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Make the yeast

  1. The day before baking, combine ½ cup cornmeal with enough boiling sweet milk to achieve a batter-like thickness, and in winter keep the mixture warm overnight.

  2. The next morning, pour 1 pint of boiling water into a pitcher, add 1 teaspoon baking soda and 1 teaspoon salt.

  3. Once cool enough, add flour to make a stiff batter, then mix in the cornmeal mixture.

  4. Place the pitcher in warm water, cover with a towel, and let it rise until bubbly.

Make and bake the loaves

  1. Pour the yeast into a bread pan, add 1½ pints of warm water or a mix of water and milk, and enough flour to knead into loaves.

  2. Knead slightly harder than for biscuits and bake as soon as it rises to the top of the pan.

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).

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

Flour
Builds the gluten network that gives the loaves their structure and chew.
Cornmeal
Adds coarse body and a grainy texture to the batter.
Milk
Adds moisture and milk sugars that help the crust brown.

The step that matters

Bake as soon as the dough rises to the top of the pan. Yeast gas stretches the gluten structure while it rises. If the loaves rise too long, the structure weakens and can collapse or bake up dense and coarse, so timing the bake 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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