Name: Scones for Breakfast
Ingredients: 1 cup sour milk; 1-2 teaspoons baking soda; 1-2 tablespoons melted butter; a little salt

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 ↓

Scones for Breakfast

Ingredients

1 cup sour milk
1-2 teaspoons baking soda
1-2 tablespoons melted butter
a little salt

Directions

Make the dough

Mix sour milk, baking soda, melted butter, and salt in a bowl.
Mould the mixture into a soft dough.

Shape and cook

Cut the dough into squares.
Bake on a moderately hot griddle 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.

Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together81,283 recipes

Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Sour milk: Its acidity reacts with the baking soda to produce gas that helps the scones rise.
Baking soda: Reacts with the acid in the sour milk to leaven the dough, giving it lift.
Melted butter: Adds fat that tenderises the crumb and helps the surface brown.

“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.