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Datii Buns

A bun made with flour, butter, nutmeg, salt, eggs, cream, and caraway comfits.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Datii Buns

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the dough

  1. In a bowl, mix 2 pounds of flour with enough toddy to form a dough.

  2. Add ½ pound of fresh butter, 1 teaspoon of nutmeg, ¼ teaspoon of coarse sea salt, 2 beaten egg yolks, 1 egg white, and 6 tablespoons of cream.

  3. Cover the mixture and let it rise for 2 hours or more.

  4. Gently fold in 4 ounces of caraway comfits.

Shape and bake

  1. Shape the dough into buns and sprinkle a few comfits on top.

  2. Bake the buns on buttered baking sheets at 400°F (200°C) until golden.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Nutmeg + creamtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,920 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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 dough's structure once mixed with liquid, giving the buns their body.
Butter
Adds fat that enriches the dough and gives a tender crumb.
Egg yolks
Add richness and emulsify the fat, helping the dough hold together smoothly.
Egg white
Adds protein that helps set the structure of the baked buns.
Cream
Adds moisture and richness, softening the dough and tenderizing the crumb.
Caraway comfits
Provide sweet, aromatic caraway flavor and a crunchy sugar coating in the buns.

The step that matters

Gently fold in the caraway comfits. Comfits are hard, sugar-coated seeds. Folding them in gently keeps the coating from cracking or dissolving into the dough, so they stay crisp and their flavor remains distinct in the baked buns.

“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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