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Dessert

White Bread Balls

A dish of bread cubes mixed with milk, butter, sugar, eggs, and salt, boiled in water and served with cream sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

White Bread Balls

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the bread into dice.

  2. In a saucepan, combine milk, butter, and sugar; bring to a boil.

  3. Stir in the bread and mix until it no longer sticks to the pan; remove from heat.

Finish and cook

  1. Once cool, stir in the eggs one at a time and add salt.

  2. Cook in boiling water until done, then serve with cream sauce.

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

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

  5. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Bread
Forms the body of the dough, absorbing the milk to give the balls their structure.
Eggs
Bind the dough and set during cooking, holding the balls together.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving a tender texture to the dough.
Milk
Provides moisture that the bread soaks up, softening the dough.

The step that matters

Stir in the bread until it no longer sticks to the pan. Cooking the bread in the hot milk and butter drives off moisture and gelatinizes its starch, so the dough firms up. Removing it from heat once it pulls away from the pan keeps it from becoming stiff and dry.

“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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