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Dessert

Milk Rolls

Milk rolls are small rolls made from self-raising flour, butter, and milk, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk 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 ↓

Milk Rolls

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. In a bowl, combine 1 lb of self-raising flour and rub in 2 oz of butter with your hands.

  2. Add enough milk to form a firm dough.

  3. Sprinkle flour on a board and turn the dough out onto it.

Shape and bake

  1. Flour a knife and cut the dough into twelve pieces.

  2. Shape each piece into a small roll.

  3. Flour a baking tin.

  4. Place the rolls on the tin and bake in a preheated oven at 400°F (200°C) for 20 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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 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

Self-raising flour
Provides the structure of the rolls and, with its raising agent, lets them rise as they bake.
Butter
Rubbed into the flour, it coats the flour particles and tenderises the crumb while adding richness.
Milk
Hydrates the flour to form a firm dough and adds moisture and browning through its milk sugars.

The step that matters

Rubbing in the butter. If the butter is left in large lumps or is too warm, it will not coat the flour evenly, leading to uneven texture. Rubbing it in cold and until the mixture looks like fine breadcrumbs keeps the rolls tender.

“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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