Why it works: Milk and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 77,875 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓
Dr. Boerkaave’s Sweet Butter-milk
Ingredients
Directions
Make the buttermilk
Pour the milk into a small churn.
Churn for about 10 minutes until butter flakes form and the milk appears thin and blue.
Strain the mixture through a sieve.
Serve
Drink the butter milk frequently as the main beverage.
Accompany with biscuits, rusks, and various ripe or dried fruits.
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.
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Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together77,875 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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
- Milk from the cow
- Churning separates the milk's fat into butter flakes, leaving the thin buttermilk liquid.
The step that matters
Churn until butter flakes form. Churning must go far enough to separate the fat into flakes, but stopping too late can make the butter grainy and over-worked, while stopping too early leaves the milk unseparated.
“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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