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Bread Cakes

Bread cakes made from stale bread, sour milk, eggs, and flour, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Bread Cakes

Why it works: Flour and buckwheat work together. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 660 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Bread Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. Soak stale bread in sour milk overnight.

  2. In the morning, rub the soaked bread through a colander.

  3. Add egg yolks, salt, baking soda, sugar, and enough flour to make a thick batter.

Finish and bake

  1. Fold in the beaten egg whites gently.

  2. Bake until golden.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + buckwheattop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together660 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  3. Milk + buckwheattop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together328 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, creamy).

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

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

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Stale bread
Soaked and rubbed smooth, it forms the body of the batter and adds moisture.
Sour milk
Its acidity reacts with the baking soda, helping the cakes rise and turn tender.
Egg yolks
Add richness and help bind the batter together.
Baking soda
Reacts with the sour milk to produce gas that lightens the batter.
Egg whites
Whipped and folded in, they trap air that adds lift and a lighter crumb.
Flour
Provides structure so the batter holds its shape while baking.

The step that matters

Folding in the beaten egg whites. Stirring vigorously knocks out the air trapped in the whites, so the cakes bake up flatter and denser. Gentle folding keeps the air in the batter for lift.

Swap the buckwheat

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

  1. Cinnamonfits about as well
  2. Nutmegfits about as well
  3. Buckwheatthe original
  4. Capersfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, milk, egg, sugar, flour. 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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