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Dessert

Soft Muffins

Soft muffins made with eggs, milk, butter, salt, yeast, and flour, baked until light brown.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Soft Muffins

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Warm the milk and butter together.

  2. Add the salt to the warm milk and butter.

  3. Beat the eggs until very light.

  4. Stir the beaten eggs into the milk and butter mixture.

  5. Stir in the yeast.

  6. Add enough sifted flour to make a thick batter.

  7. Cover the mixture and let it rise in a warm place for about 3 hours.

Bake and serve

  1. Grease your baking iron and muffin rings.

  2. Set the rings on the iron.

  3. Pour the batter into the rings.

  4. Bake until they are a light brown.

  5. When splitting to butter, pull them open instead of cutting with a knife to keep them light.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

Eggs
Beaten eggs add structure and lightness to the batter as they set during baking.
Milk
Provides the liquid that hydrates the flour and forms the batter's base.
Butter
Adds fat for a tender crumb and richer flavor.
Brewer's yeast
Ferments during the long rise, producing gas that leavens the muffins.
Sifted flour
Provides the starch and gluten network that gives the muffins their body.

The step that matters

Pulling the muffins open after baking. Cutting with a knife compresses the crumb and squeezes out air, making the muffins dense. Pulling them apart along their natural layers keeps the airy texture the rise created.

“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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