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Dessert

Plain Muffins

Plain muffins made with milk, flour, butter, yeast, eggs, and salt.

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 ↓

Plain Muffins

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sponge

  1. Scald the milk, add the butter and let it cool until lukewarm.

  2. Dissolve the yeast or compressed cake in ¼ cup warm water and add it to the milk mixture.

  3. Add the salt and the flour and beat well.

  4. Cover and let it rise in a warm place overnight.

Finish and bake

  1. Beat the eggs separately, add the yolks first, then the whites, and beat well.

  2. Let the mixture stand for 15 minutes.

  3. Bake in greased muffin rings on a griddle or in the oven 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.

  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. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + eggtop 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

Flour
Forms the structure that holds the muffins together as they set.
Yeast
Produces gas during the overnight rise, making the muffins light and airy.
Eggs
Add richness and help bind and set the batter as it bakes.
Milk
Provides moisture and liquid that hydrates the flour and feeds the yeast.
Butter
Adds fat for softer texture and a richer flavor.

The step that matters

Let it rise in a warm place overnight. Yeast needs time and warmth to produce enough gas to leaven the batter. If the rise is too short or too cool, the muffins will be dense. Covering the bowl keeps the surface from drying out and forming a crust that blocks expansion.

“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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