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Bread Fried Cakes

Fried cakes made from soaked bread, milk, eggs, baking soda, salt, flour, and fried in butter or lard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Bread Fried Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. Soak leftover bread in milk or a milk-water mixture until soft.

  2. Mash the soaked bread until fine.

  3. Add eggs, baking soda, salt, and enough flour to create a batter.

Fry

  1. Drop spoonfuls of the batter into hot butter or lard.

  2. Fry 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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  3. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, 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

Leftover bread
Provides the bulk of the batter and soaks up milk to become soft and tender.
Eggs
Bind the mixture together and add structure as they set in the hot fat.
Baking soda
Reacts to lighten the batter so the fried cakes rise and stay tender.
Flour
Thickens the mixture into a batter that holds its shape when dropped into the fat.
Butter or lard
Conducts heat to fry the outside, producing browning and a rich flavour.

The step that matters

Frying in hot fat. If the butter or lard is not hot enough, the batter absorbs fat and turns greasy instead of crisping and browning. Fat that is too hot browns the outside before the centre sets, so the cakes stay raw inside.

“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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