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Dessert

French Rolls

A sweet roll made with mashed potatoes, yeast dough, butter, sugar, eggs, cinnamon, baking soda, cream of tartar, and dried currants.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

French Rolls

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Boil and mash the potatoes.

  2. In a bowl, combine the water and yeast.

  3. Stir in enough flour to make a stiff dough and set aside to rise until light.

  4. Once risen, add the butter, sugar, eggs, cinnamon, baking soda, cream of tartar, and currants.

Shape and bake

  1. Roll out the dough and place on baking tins.

  2. 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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Flour + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Potato + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,012 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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.
Flour
Forms the stiff dough structure that holds the rolls together.
Eggs
Add richness and help bind the dough and set its structure.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and a richer crumb.
Sugar
Sweetens the dough and helps browning in the oven.
Baking soda
Reacts with the cream of tartar to lift the dough and add lightness.

The step that matters

Let the dough rise until light. Yeast needs time to produce gas that expands the dough. Rolling or baking before it has risen fully leaves dense rolls with poor volume.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (potato, flour, butter, sugar, egg, cinnamon, cream):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against potato, flour, butter, sugar, egg, cinnamon, cream. 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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