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Dessert

Breakfast Muffins

A quick batter of milk, eggs, flour, sugar, salt, and baking powder baked in a greased pan.

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 ↓

Breakfast Muffins

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. Beat the egg yolks, then add the milk.

  2. Stir in the salt and sugar.

  3. Sift in flour until the batter is as stiff as for cake, then add the baking powder.

  4. Mix everything together, then fold in the beaten egg whites.

Bake

  1. Grease a ring or gem pan with melted butter.

  2. Pour the batter into the prepared pan and bake for 10 minutes.

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. Flour + buttertop 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).

Flour and butter 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

Eggs
Yolks enrich the batter and whites, beaten and folded in, lighten it for a tender crumb.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the muffins together as they set.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the muffins rise in the oven.
Milk
Adds moisture and loosens the batter to a pourable consistency.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the muffins brown during baking.

The step that matters

Fold in the beaten egg whites. Folding gently keeps the air beaten into the whites, which helps the muffins rise and stay light. Stirring vigorously would knock out that air and make them dense.

“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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