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Plain White Family Bread

A simple yeast bread made with flour, yeast, lard, salt, water, and optional sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and walnut are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,873 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Plain White Family Bread

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sponge

  1. Mix 1 pint of flour with ½ pint of hop yeast in the afternoon.

  2. Place ½ gallon of flour in a tray and make a well in the center at night.

  3. Add the yeast mixture and the piece of lard to the well.

Make and rise the dough

  1. Knead in tepid salted water until well combined.

  2. Place the dough in a jar to rise overnight.

  3. Knead the dough again with a little flour the next morning.

Shape and bake

  1. Divide the dough into two loaves and place in a warm area to rise.

  2. Bake the loaves until done, then wrap in a coarse towel.

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 + walnuttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Walnut + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,147 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Forms the gluten network that gives the bread its structure and chew.
Hop yeast
Produces gas that makes the dough rise and gives it a light crumb.
Lard
Adds fat that tenderises the crumb and softens the texture.
Salt
Controls yeast activity and strengthens the gluten for flavour and structure.

The step that matters

Overnight rise in the jar. The long slow rise lets the yeast ferment the dough gradually, building flavour and gas. Letting it rise too long or too warm can over-ferment the dough, weakening its structure.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Milletfits better
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar. 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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