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Bread

Rolls, and Muffins

A baked roll and muffin made with milk, yeast, eggs, coriander, caraway, ginger, sugar, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Coriander and ginger match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,505 recipes. Both carry trans-2-decenal, which smells waxy, orange. The science ↓

Rolls, and Muffins

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Boil the milk and let it cool.

  2. Add the yeast, eggs, coriander seeds, caraway seeds, ginger, and sugar. Beat together.

  3. Add flour to make a stiff paste.

Shape and bake

  1. Divide the mixture into long thin bricks and place them on tins.

  2. Set them before the fire for a short time to rise, then bake until golden.

Slice and dry

  1. When cold, cut into slices and dry them in a slack oven.

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. Coriander + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,505 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  2. Coriander + carawaytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together185 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-decenal (green, must).

  3. Caraway + flourtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,435 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Caraway + gingertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together288 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. 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

Yeast
Ferments the dough so it rises and becomes light.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and add structure and richness to the crumb.
Flour
Forms the stiff paste that gives the bread its body.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast and adds sweetness and browning.
Milk
Provides moisture and softness to the dough.

The step that matters

Setting the bricks to rise before baking. Yeast needs a short warm rest to produce gas and expand the dough. If it rises too long or too little, the texture turns dense or collapses in the oven.

Swap the coriander

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, egg, caraway, ginger, sugar, flour):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Corianderthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, egg, caraway, ginger, sugar, flour. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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