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Bread

Cream Bread

A sweet, milk-based bread made with lard, sugar, salt, yeast, and 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 ↓

Cream Bread

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. In a pot, combine milk and water and bring to a boil.

  2. Add lard, sugar, and salt to the boiling mixture.

  3. Let the mixture cool, then add the dissolved yeast cake.

  4. Stir in enough flour to create a stiff batter and beat until smooth.

  5. Let the batter rise until evening.

Shape and rise

  1. In the morning, add more flour and knead well.

  2. Shape the dough into loaves and let rise until doubled in size.

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

Milk
Adds richness, tenderness, and a softer crumb to the bread.
Lard
Adds fat, which tenderizes the crumb and gives a richer texture.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast and adds a touch of sweetness and browning.
Yeast cake
Ferments the dough, producing gas that makes the loaves rise.
Flour
Provides the gluten structure that traps gas and gives the bread its shape.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool before adding the yeast. Yeast is killed by very hot liquid. The boiled milk and water must cool enough that the yeast stays alive and can ferment the dough.

“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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