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Bread

Spice Bread

A sweet dough made with sugar, lemon peel, cinnamon, honey, and water, baked into a spiced bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,950 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Spice Bread

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. In an enamelled saucepan, combine honey and water and heat until hot.

  2. Stir in half of the sugar, lemon peel, and cinnamon.

  3. Add flour gradually, beating until the paste loosens from the saucepan.

  4. Continue adding flour until the mixture is workable.

Shape and bake

  1. Roll out the dough to the thickness of a thin knife and cut into pieces.

  2. Bake in a greased baking dish, icing with syrup of sugar and water halfway through baking.

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. Lemon + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Cinnamon + flourtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Cinnamon + honeytop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,446 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-methoxybenzaldehyde (sweet, anise).

  4. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Honey
Adds sweetness and moisture, and helps bind the dough into a paste.
Pounded sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the crust brown during baking.
Flour
Provides the structure that turns the mixture into a workable dough.
Cinnamon
Adds warm spice aroma and flavour to the bread.

The step that matters

Adding the flour gradually. Flour absorbs liquid and thickens the mixture as it is added. Adding it slowly lets the paste loosen and reach a workable dough without becoming stiff or dry.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, cinnamon, honey, flour):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, cinnamon, honey, 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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