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Bread From Milk Yeast

A quick bread made with cornmeal, flour, and a milk-based yeast mixture.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Bread From Milk Yeast

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the yeast

  1. Pour enough boiling milk over the cornmeal to make a batter-like consistency.

  2. Pour boiling water into a pitcher, then add baking soda and salt.

  3. Let the mixture cool.

  4. Add enough flour to the cooled mixture to make a stiff batter.

  5. Mix in the cornmeal mixture.

  6. Place the pitcher in warm water and cover with a towel.

  7. Let it rise until bubbly.

Shape and bake

  1. Pour the yeast into a bread pan.

  2. Add warm water (or milk) to the pan.

  3. Add enough flour to knead into loaves.

  4. Knead slightly harder than for biscuits.

  5. Bake as soon as it rises to the top of the pan.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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
Builds the gluten network that gives the stiff dough its structure and chew.
Cornmeal
Adds body and a coarser texture, and its starch helps thicken the batter.
Warm water or milk
Supplies moisture for the dough; milk adds softness and helps the crust brown.

The step that matters

Bake as soon as it rises to the top of the pan. The yeast keeps producing gas, so dough left past full rise can over-expand, collapse, and lose structure in the oven.

“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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