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Breakfast

Toasted Muffins

A batter of eggs, milk, and dry mixture is fried into muffins.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Toasted Muffins

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Beat the eggs thoroughly and mix in the milk.

  2. Stir this into the dry mixture to form a stiff paste.

Fry and serve

  1. Dip a tablespoon in cold milk, fill it with the batter, and drop it into boiling fat in a frying pan.

  2. Fry for about 10 minutes until done.

  3. Drain the muffins and place them on a napkin over a dish.

  4. Serve hot.

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. 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).

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
Bind the batter and add structure as they set during frying.
Milk
Moistens the dry mixture so it forms a workable batter.
Dry mixture (flour and other dry ingredients)
Provides the body that holds the stiff paste together.

The step that matters

Dropping the batter into boiling fat. Batter dropped into fat that is not hot enough absorbs grease and cooks unevenly. Dipping the spoon in cold milk first lets the batter release cleanly into the fat.

“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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