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Bread From Milk Yeast

A yeast bread made with milk, cornmeal, 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

Prepare the starter

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

  2. Keep it warm overnight.

  3. Pour 1 pint of boiling water into a pitcher.

  4. Add 1 teaspoon baking soda.

  5. Add 1 teaspoon salt.

  6. Let it cool slightly.

  7. Add enough flour to make a stiff batter.

  8. Mix in the cornmeal mixture.

  9. Place the pitcher in warm water.

  10. Cover with a towel.

  11. Keep warm until the yeast rises.

Shape and bake

  1. Pour the yeast into a bread pan.

  2. Add 1½ pints of warm water or a mix of water and milk.

  3. Add enough flour to knead into loaves.

  4. Knead slightly harder than for biscuits.

  5. 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
Thickens the batter and adds body and a mild corn flavor to the bread.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the dough together and lets it be kneaded into loaves.
Baking soda
Reacts with the liquids to give off gas that helps lighten the dough.
Yeast (in the method)
Ferments the dough, producing gas that makes the bread rise.

The step that matters

Bake as soon as it rises to the top of the pan. Yeast dough that rises past the top of the pan or sits too long can over-proof, collapsing its gas structure and giving a coarse, sunken loaf. Baking at the right moment keeps the crumb light.

“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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