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Bread

Spoon Bread

Spoon Bread is a yeasted bread made with milk, sugar, salt, shortening, water, yeast, and enriched flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Spoon Bread

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Scald the milk and stir in sugar, salt, and shortening.

  2. Cool to lukewarm.

  3. In a bowl, measure warm water and stir in yeast until dissolved.

  4. Add the milk mixture and flour, then stir and blend well.

  5. Cover and let rise for about 40 minutes until doubled in bulk.

  6. Stir down the dough and beat vigorously for 30 seconds.

Shape and bake

  1. Turn into greased baking pans and let rise for 30 minutes until doubled.

  2. Bake for 1 hour.

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 + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Enriched flour
Provides the gluten network that gives the bread its structure.
Yeast
Produces gas that makes the dough rise and become airy.
Milk
Adds moisture and softness to the crumb.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast and adds a mild sweetness.
Shortening
Adds fat that tenderizes the crumb.

The step that matters

Cool the milk to lukewarm before adding the yeast. Yeast is a living organism that can be killed by hot liquid. Cooling the scalded milk to lukewarm keeps the yeast active so the dough can rise properly.

“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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