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Zante Muffins

A muffin made with cornmeal, flour, currants, butter, sugar, eggs, milk, and baking powder.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Zante Muffins

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Cream the butter in a bowl.

  2. Gradually add the sugar and mix well.

  3. Add the beaten eggs and milk, mixing until combined.

  4. In a separate bowl, mix and sift the dry ingredients.

  5. Gradually add the dry ingredients to the wet mixture, then fold in the currants.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into buttered individual tins.

  2. Bake 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. 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).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  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

Butter
Creams with the sugar to trap air and give the muffins a tender, rich texture.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure and richness as the muffins set in the oven.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking so the muffins rise and become light.
Cornmeal
Provides the coarse, grainy texture and structure that defines these muffins.
Flour
Gives the batter structure so it sets firm as it bakes.
Sugar
Sweetens the batter and helps the muffins brown as they bake.

The step that matters

Folding in the dry ingredients. Adding the dry ingredients gradually and mixing only until combined keeps the batter from becoming overworked. Overmixing develops gluten in the flour, which can make the muffins tough and dense.

Swap the currant

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

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

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