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Dessert

Regina Buns

Regina buns are sweet buns made with white sugar, egg, ground rice, butter, currants, candied peel, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Regina 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.

Prepare the dough

  1. Whisk the egg and stir in the sugar until well combined.

  2. Beat the butter until creamy.

  3. Mix in the ground rice, currants, candied peel, egg, and sugar.

  4. Add enough flour to form a dough that can be rolled into 7 or 8 balls.

Shape and bake

  1. Place the balls on a buttered baking sheet.

  2. Do not let them stand too long before baking to prevent heaviness.

  3. Bake in a brisk oven at 400°F (200°C) for 30 to 35 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 + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Rice + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,645 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Rice + flourtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Ground rice
Provides the bulk and a light, slightly crumbly texture in the buns.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, tenderizing the dough and carrying flavour.
Egg
Binds the dough together and adds moisture and structure.
Currants
Add sweetness and chewy fruit pieces throughout the buns.
White sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the buns brown lightly in the oven.

The step that matters

Baking the balls promptly. Letting the shaped dough stand too long before baking can make the buns heavy, because the dough loses lift and its texture suffers. Bake soon after shaping.

Swap the currant

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

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

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