Brownies and milk, cake and milk, cookies and milk…for most folks, milk seems to complement and “chase down” baked foods much better than say, soda or water or just about any other beverage.
Any particular reason for this?
Of course, surely there are those who may prefer beer with their pastries. 
I wouldn’t be surprised to find this is a particularly American taste - I have only heard of Americans eating biscuits with milk. Milk-drinking in the UK seems more a child’s thing, while adults would have tea and biscuits instead.
Yeah at least here in France, unless you’re kid, it’s really not usual to drink milk with this kind of food. Coffee would be the drink of choice.
Coffee with milk in it? [And, in the UK, I assume you guys dunk your digestive biscuits in tea with milk in it, no?]
Human taste selection over centuries. The taste good together things have been matched up.
No, plain coffee, maybe with sugar.
Coffee with milk is more for breakfast, for those who like.
I’m one of those poor soul who loves loves milk but doesn’t digest it well and when I still used to drink milk, no one ever followed my lead and helped themselves to a big glass of milk when eating cake or something.
My grandpa dunks his biscuits in beer. It looks a bit odd to see it doing it!
You know what else is great with milk?
Chili.
I’ve always wondered if this is generally known or if I am the only one.
-FrL-
If the chili is quite spicy, they work so well together because the milk, having lipids, can pull the oil based capsaicin off your tongue (kind of like soap pulls off grease). They say bread works (but it doesn’t), and water just spreads it around.
My WAG is that pastries tend to have a certain amount of fat in them, and that water-based drinks (such as soda or beer) don’t do a very good job of dissolving the oils & fats that cling to the inside of your mouth. Milk, with its additional fat content, does a better job of “washing away” these fats — as do hot drinks such as tea and coffee.
As Santo Rugger notes, standard advice seems to be that milk is good for “putting out the fire” when you’re eating really spicy foods — capsaicin, the heat-causing compound in peppers, is oil-soluble rather than water-soluble, and so would “wash down” the chili better than water or beer for the reasons stated above. I’ve never actually tried this myself, though.
Fatty drinks “wash away” the oily capsaicin, but alcohol dissolves it. Hence the beer and tequila accompaniment to traditional Mexican dishes. Cecil had an article about it, even. So I wouldn’t say milk is better than beer, but they are both better than water.
Acidic foods also seem to help, which means that sour cream and yogurt are the best options for dealing with too-spicy foods.