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Mary Hill's Finger-rolls

A yeast bread roll made with milk, butter, sugar, egg whites, and flour, shaped into finger rolls and baked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Mary Hill's Finger-rolls

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Heat the milk to a boil and add the butter, salt, and sugar. Set aside until lukewarm.

  2. Stir in the beaten egg whites and the dissolved yeast cake.

  3. Pour the mixture over the sifted flour and work into a dough.

  4. Knead the dough for 15 minutes and let it rise overnight.

Shape and bake

  1. In the morning, cut and slash the dough with a sharp knife and let it rise again.

  2. When light, pull the dough into long finger-rolls and bake until golden brown.

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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour 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

Flour
Forms the dough's structure, which holds the rolls' shape as they rise and bake.
Egg whites
Add structure and help bind the dough.
Yeast cake
Ferments the dough, producing gas that makes it rise and become light.
Butter
Adds fat that softens the crumb and gives a tender texture.
Milk
Adds moisture and richness to the dough.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast and adds sweetness and browning in the oven.

The step that matters

Letting the dough rise overnight. Yeast needs time and warmth to produce gas; a slow, long rise develops flavor and a light texture. Rising too short or too long can leave the rolls dense or collapsed.

“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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