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Bread

French Rolls

A yeast bread roll made with flour, lard, sugar, yeast, salt, and milk, baked at 400°F.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

French Rolls

Oven, in the book's wordsA very hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Put the flour into a bowl and rub in the lard until the flour looks moist.

  2. In a separate bowl, dissolve the sugar and salt in 1½ pints of warm milk, then pour this mixture into the center of the flour.

  3. Dissolve the yeast in the remaining milk and add it to the flour mixture, kneading everything together thoroughly.

  4. Cover the dough to keep it warm and let it rise for about 1 hour.

Shape and bake

  1. Once risen, knead the dough again and divide it into pieces of the desired size, shaping them as you like.

  2. Place the shaped rolls onto baking sheets, wash them with egg, and let them rise again for about 30 minutes.

  3. Bake in a very hot oven at 400°F (200°C) for 10 minutes.

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. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

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

Flour
Forms the structure of the dough as gluten develops during kneading.
Lard
Rubbed into the flour to add fat, tenderness and a softer crumb.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast and adds sweetness and browning to the crust.
Yeast
Produces gas that makes the dough rise and become light.
Milk
Hydrates the flour and dissolves the yeast, giving the dough moisture and softness.

The step that matters

Kneading the dough thoroughly. Thorough kneading develops gluten so the dough can trap the gas from the yeast and rise well. Under-kneaded dough bakes up dense and heavy.

“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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