Skip to main content
Main

Fruit Breads with Baking Powder

Fruit breads made with flour, baking powder, milk, butter, eggs, fruit, and lemon extract.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Fruit Breads with Baking Powder

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the dough

  1. Sift together the white flour and baking powder.

  2. Cream the butter, sugar, and eggs in a large bowl.

  3. Add 3 pints of milk and mix in the flour mixture.

  4. Stir in the remaining pint of milk and the fruit to form a smooth dough.

Shape and bake

  1. Mold the dough into loaves and place in tins.

  2. Set the tins in a warm place to rise slightly.

  3. Bake in a moderate oven at 350°F (175°C) until golden.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (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

White flour
Provides the structure that holds the loaves together as they bake.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the dough, lifting the loaves as they bake.
Eggs
Add structure and richness, helping the crumb set as it bakes.
Butter and lard
Add fat, which tenderises the crumb and carries flavour.
Sugar
Sweetens the bread and helps the crust brown as it bakes.
Fruit
Adds moisture and sweetness, along with flavour and texture throughout the loaf.

The step that matters

Rising in the tins. The dough should rise only slightly before baking. Baking powder starts producing gas as soon as it is wet, so over-proofing can cause the loaves to collapse or bake up dense and uneven.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, milk, sugar, butter, egg):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, milk, sugar, butter, egg. 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.

More fruit bread recipes

Pudding 44 See all 14 →

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes