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Sweet Bread

A savory bread-like dish made with butter, flour, spices, meat, eggs, and fried in lard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread 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 ↓

Sweet Bread

Ingredients

Directions

Make the mixture

  1. In a stew pan, melt the butter over low heat.

  2. Add flour, pepper, salt, and nutmeg; mix well.

  3. Chop the meat and add it to the mixture; stir until combined.

  4. Let the mixture cool, then add the yolks of two eggs to bind it.

Shape and coat

  1. Shape the mixture into an oblong form.

  2. Dip the shaped mixture into the beaten egg with pepper and salt.

  3. Roll in bread crumbs or powdered crackers.

Fry

  1. Fry in boiling lard 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 + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

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

Egg yolks
Bind the mixture together so it holds its shape when formed and fried.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the flour base, carrying flavour through the mixture.
Flour
Thickens the melted butter into a paste that helps hold the meat together.
Beaten egg
Creates a sticky layer so the bread crumbs or crackers adhere to the shaped mixture.
Bread crumbs or powdered crackers
Forms a crisp, golden outer crust when fried in lard.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool before adding the egg yolks. Egg yolks begin to set when exposed to heat, so adding them to a hot mixture can cause them to scramble in lumps rather than blending smoothly and binding evenly.

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, butter, flour, pepper, meat, bread):

  1. Nutmegthe original
  2. Parsleyfits about as well
  3. Capersfits less well
  4. Thymefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, butter, flour, pepper, meat, bread. 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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