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Dessert

Lunch Buns

Sweet buns made with flour, currants, brown sugar, lard, eggs, milk, and baking powder.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Lunch Buns

36 patty tins
Oven, in the book's wordsA very hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 425°F (220°C).

Make and bake the batter

  1. In a large bowl, mix the lard and brown sugar together until well combined.

  2. Beat in the eggs, then add the milk, flour, currants, baking powder, and lemon essence.

  3. Mix the batter thoroughly until smooth.

  4. Grease 36 patty tins and half-fill each with the batter.

  5. Bake for about 15 minutes or 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. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Currant + milktop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,475 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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 in the oven.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, making the buns rise and turn light.
Lard
Creamed with the sugar to add fat, tenderness and a short crumb.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and moisture, and helps the buns brown in the oven.
Flour
Provides the main structure that sets as the buns bake.

The step that matters

Mix the batter thoroughly until smooth. Thorough mixing fully combines the fat, eggs and liquid so the batter bakes evenly. Once the flour is evenly hydrated, the gluten network and leavening work together to give a uniform rise and crumb.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar, egg, milk, lemon. 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.

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