Skip to main content
Drink

Dr. Boerhaave's Sweet Butter Milk

A sweetened beverage made by churning milk to produce butter flakes and thin milk, served with biscuits, rusks, and fruits.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Biscuit and raisin work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 118 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Dr. Boerhaave's Sweet Butter Milk

Ingredients

Directions

Make the buttermilk

  1. Pour fresh milk into a small churn.

  2. Churn for about 10 minutes until butter flakes form and the milk appears thin and blue.

  3. Strain the milk through a sieve.

Serve

  1. Drink the butter milk frequently as a main beverage.

  2. Serve with biscuits, rusks, and various fruits.

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. Biscuit + raisintop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Milk + raisintop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,155 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanoic acid (acides aroma).

  4. Sugar + biscuittop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  5. Milk + biscuittop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,332 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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 butter flakes from the liquid, which becomes the buttermilk.

The step that matters

Churn until butter flakes form. Churning must go far enough to separate the butterfat into flakes, but stopping too late can over-work the cream. Watching for flakes and a thinner, bluish liquid shows when the separation is complete.

Swap the raisin

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, sugar, biscuit):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinthe original
  3. Blueberryfits about as well
  4. Figfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, sugar, biscuit. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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.

You might also like

Raisin WineRaisin Wine64 recipesVegetable SoupVegetable Soup350 recipesRaspberry VinegarRaspberry Vinegar214 recipesBrown Coffee with EggBrown Coffee with Egg175 recipes