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Beauregard Bread

A yeast bread made with flour, hop yeast, eggs, sugar, lard, butter, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Beauregard Bread

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sponge

  1. Stir together 1 pint of flour and ½ pint of hop yeast in a bowl. Set the mixture aside in a warm place to rise.

  2. Beat 6 eggs with 1 coffee cup of sugar.

Make and rise the dough

  1. Work 1 tablespoon of lard and 1 tablespoon of butter into ½ gallon of flour in a large bowl. Add 1 teaspoon of salt to the flour mixture.

  2. Pour the yeast mixture and beaten eggs into the center of the flour mixture and knead into a pliant dough.

  3. If the dough is stiff, add another egg; do not add water.

  4. At 3 o'clock, work the dough again, shape it into loaves, and let it rise until ready to bake.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake until golden brown.

  2. Serve hot or cold.

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 + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 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. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Coffee + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,344 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Flour and butter 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

Flour
Forms the gluten network that gives the dough its structure.
Hop yeast
Produces gas that makes the dough rise.
Eggs
Add richness and moisture and help bind the dough.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast and adds sweetness and browning.
Lard
Adds fat that tenderises the crumb.
Butter
Adds fat for flavour and a softer texture.

The step that matters

Adding the extra egg only if the dough is stiff. Flour absorbs liquid differently from batch to batch, so judging the dough by its feel rather than adding liquid by rule keeps it pliant. Too much flour makes the loaves dense and dry, so the check matters before shaping and rising.

“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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