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Bread

Bread

A sweet yeast bread with currants, butter, milk, eggs, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk 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 ↓

Bread

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sponge

  1. At night, melt the butter in the milk and mix with half of the flour to make a batter.

  2. Add the yeast, ensuring the batter is not too warm.

Make the dough

  1. In the morning, add the eggs, sugar, currants, and the remaining flour.

  2. Knead the dough on a floured surface, using just enough flour to prevent sticking.

Shape and bake

  1. Divide the dough into three loaves and place them in buttered pans.

  2. Let the loaves rise until light, then prick and bake.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour 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

Butter
Adds fat and richness, giving the crumb a tender, soft texture.
Eggs
Add structure and richness, helping the loaves hold together and set when baked.
Yeast
Produces gas that makes the dough rise and become light and airy.
Flour
Forms the gluten network that gives the dough its structure and chew.
Milk
Adds moisture and richness, and its sugars help the crust brown.
English currants
Provide sweetness and small bursts of fruit flavour throughout the loaves.

The step that matters

Keep the batter not too warm when adding the yeast. Yeast works best at moderate temperatures; if the batter is too warm, the yeast can be killed or work too fast, weakening the rise.

Swap the currant

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

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

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

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