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Breakfast and Ea

A yeast biscuit dough made with milk, butter, sugar, and flour, baked after rising.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Breakfast and Ea

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Dissolve the yeast in ½ cup of cold water.

  2. Mix the yeast, milk, butter, sugar, and salt together.

  3. Stir the mixture into the flour and knead well.

  4. Let the dough rise overnight.

Shape and bake

  1. In the morning, shape the dough into biscuits.

  2. Let the biscuits rise for 1.5 hours.

  3. Bake the biscuits for 30 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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Butter + flourtop 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. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Butter and flour 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 structure that holds gas from the yeast and sets when baked.
Yeast
Produces gas during fermentation, making the dough rise and giving a light texture.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast and adds sweetness and browning in the baked biscuits.
Butter
Adds fat that tenderizes the crumb and contributes richness and flavor.
Milk
Adds moisture and proteins that enrich the crumb and promote browning.

The step that matters

Let the dough rise overnight. Yeast needs enough time to ferment and build gas and flavor; under-proofed dough bakes dense, while over-proofed dough can collapse or taste sour.

“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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