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Bread-and-milk Cakes

A cake made from soaked bread crumbs, milk, butter, eggs, molasses, flour, and baking powder, cooked on a griddle.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Bread-and-milk Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Soak the dry bread crumbs in the milk for 1 hour.

  2. Beat in the melted butter, whipped eggs, salt, and molasses.

  3. Mix thoroughly, then gently stir in the flour and baking powder.

Cook

  1. Cook the cakes on a soapstone griddle until golden brown.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  3. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, 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

Dry bread crumbs
Soak up the milk to form the bulk of the batter.
Milk
Softens the bread crumbs and adds moisture to the batter.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure as they set on the griddle.
All-purpose flour
Adds body and helps the cakes hold their shape.
Baking powder
Releases gas that lifts the batter so the cakes rise.
Molasses
Adds sweetness and flavor and helps the cakes brown.

The step that matters

Stir in the flour and baking powder gently. Overmixing once the flour is added develops gluten and deflates the air from the whipped eggs and baking powder, leaving the cakes dense rather than light.

“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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