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Plain Loaf Bread

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

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 Loaf Bread

Ingredients

Directions

Make 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 9 PM.

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

Knead and rise

  1. Knead the mixture with 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.

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

Bake and finish

  1. Bake the loaves when ready, then wrap them 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
Ferments the dough, producing gas that makes the loaves rise.
Lard
Adds fat, which tenderizes the crumb and softens the texture.
Coarse sea salt
Controls yeast activity and strengthens the gluten for flavor and structure.

The step that matters

Knead the dough again the next morning. Overnight fermentation can make the dough slack and gassy. A brief re-kneading redistributes the gas and rebuilds gluten structure, so the loaves hold their shape and rise evenly.

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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