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Bread

Hasty Bun

A quick, sweet bread‑like bun made with flour, sugar, milk, butter, eggs, and baking powder.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Hasty Bun

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.

Prepare

  1. Cream the butter, powdered sugar, and eggs together.

  2. Add the milk, reserving ¼ pint, and stir well.

  3. Sift the baking powder into the flour and mix it in.

  4. Add more milk if needed to achieve a batter similar to pound cake.

Shape and bake

  1. Drop spoonfuls of the mixture onto well‑buttered cake tins, spacing them 2 inches apart.

  2. Wash the tops with a mixture of egg and milk.

  3. Bake in a hot oven at 400°F (200°C) until golden.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, 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

Butter
Adds fat and richness, giving a tender crumb and helping the bun brown.
Eggs
Add structure and richness, helping the batter set as it bakes.
Flour
Forms the structure that holds the buns together as they bake.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, helping the buns rise and turn light.
Powdered sugar
Adds sweetness and dissolves easily into the creamed butter and eggs.
Milk
Adds moisture and loosens the mixture into a batter.

The step that matters

Add more milk if needed to achieve a batter similar to pound cake.. The batter must be thick enough to hold its shape when dropped but loose enough to spread and cook through. Flour absorbs liquid differently from batch to batch, so judging the texture matters more than the exact milk amount.

“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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