Skip to main content
Main

Southern Raisin Bread or Biscuit

A yeast-raised bread or biscuit studded with raisins, made with flour, lard, and yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Flour and raisin 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 ↓

Southern Raisin Bread or Biscuit

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a hot oven”. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Make the dough

  1. In a large bowl, mix flour, melted lard, and salt.

  2. Make a hole in the center of the flour.

  3. Dissolve the yeast in warm water and pour it into the hole.

  4. Mix in enough cold water to form a stiff dough.

  5. Add the raisins and mix well.

Rise, shape and bake

  1. Set the dough in a warm place to rise.

  2. Once risen, shape into loaves or biscuits.

  3. Bake in a preheated 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. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

All-purpose flour
Provides the structure that holds the dough together and traps gas as it rises.
Yeast
Produces carbon dioxide as it ferments, making the dough rise and become light.
Melted lard
Adds fat that tenderizes the crumb and softens the texture of the bread.
Raisins
Add sweetness and moisture, along with pockets of concentrated fruit flavor.

“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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes