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Bread

Easy Raisin Bread

A yeast-raisin loaf made with water, lard, sugar, raisins, salt, eggs, and flour, baked after rising.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Raisin and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Easy Raisin Bread

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. Dissolve the yeast cake in cold water.

  2. In a large bowl, combine warm water, lard, sugar, raisins, salt, and beaten eggs.

  3. Stir in flour until you can no longer stir. Do not knead.

  4. Let the mixture sit at room temperature until evening.

  5. Run a knife around the sides and through the dough several times.

Shape and bake

  1. In the morning, flour your hands.

  2. Pinch off enough dough for each loaf.

  3. Place the dough in separate pans.

  4. Let the dough rise.

  5. Bake the loaves.

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. Raisin + flourtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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

Yeast cake
Ferments the dough so it rises and becomes light.
Flour
Forms the gluten structure that holds the loaves together.
Eggs
Add structure and richness to the crumb.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast and adds sweetness and browning.
Raisins
Add sweetness and chewy pockets of fruit throughout the bread.

The step that matters

Stir in flour until you can no longer stir, without kneading. Stopping at a shaggy, sticky dough keeps the texture tender; adding too much flour or kneading toughens the crumb by overdeveloping gluten, making the loaves dense.

“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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