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Bread

Bread From Milk Yeast

Bread made with milk yeast and cornmeal, boiled water, baking soda, salt, and flour.

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 From Milk Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Pour enough boiling hot sweet milk over ½ cup cornmeal to make a batter-like consistency.

  2. Keep the mixture warm overnight in winter.

  3. Mix 1 pint boiling water with 1 teaspoon baking soda and 1 teaspoon salt.

  4. Add this mixture to the cornmeal batter until it forms a stiff batter.

Let it rise

  1. Place the pitcher in warm water, cover it with a towel, and keep it warm until the yeast rises.

  2. Pour the yeast into a bread pan.

Knead and bake

  1. Add 1½ pints warm water (or a mix of water and milk).

  2. Add enough flour to knead into loaves.

  3. Knead slightly harder than for biscuits.

  4. 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

Cornmeal
Forms a thick batter that gives the bread body and a coarser crumb.
Flour
Its gluten builds the structure that holds the loaves together as they are kneaded.
Warm water or milk
Hydrates the flour and loosens the batter so it can be kneaded into dough.
Baking soda
Reacts with acidic ingredients to release gas that lightens the crumb.

The step that matters

Bake as soon as it rises to the top of the pan. If the dough rises too long, its gas bubbles grow past what the gluten network can hold, so the structure weakens and can collapse in the oven. Baking at the right moment keeps the loaf light and even.

“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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