Name: English Breakfast Muffins
Ingredients: 1 pint sweet milk (or ½ pint milk and ½ pint water); 1 teaspoon salt; White flour (as needed); 1 tablespoon sugar; 1 teaspoon baking soda (saleratus); Boiling water (as needed); Graham flour or corn flour (optional)

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 ↓

English Breakfast Muffins

Ingredients

1 pint sweet milk (or ½ pint milk and ½ pint water)
1 teaspoon salt
White flour (as needed)
1 tablespoon sugar
1 teaspoon baking soda (saleratus)
Boiling water (as needed)
Graham flour or corn flour (optional)

Directions

Combine 1 pint of sweet milk (or half milk and half water) with 1 teaspoon of salt.
Stir in enough white flour to form a batter.
Set the batter aside until it becomes sour, which may take up to 2 days in warm weather.
At breakfast time, add more sweet milk and water to make enough batter for your family.
Mix in 1 tablespoon of sugar, a little salt, and 1 teaspoon of baking soda in boiling water.
Stir the mixture into the batter, using white flour, Graham flour, or corn flour as desired.
Reserve 1 cup of the batter to use for the next batch.

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.

Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together78,219 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together92,116 recipes

Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).
Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together77,875 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, 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

Rice Gruel28 recipes

Peptoned Milk Gruel9 recipes

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English Breakfast Muffins