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Dessert

Stale Bread Cakes

A quick cake made from stale bread, eggs, sugar, baking powder, salt, and soaking water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 22,662 recipes. Both carry (e)-2-octenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Stale Bread Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Crumble the stale bread finely and soak it in water.

  2. Press the water from the bread.

Make and cook the batter

  1. Add the eggs, sugar, baking powder, salt, and enough soaking water to make a batter similar to buckwheat batter. Mix thoroughly before cooking.

  2. Cook over low heat until done.

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

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

  2. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Bread + sugartop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,638 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

Stale bread
Forms the body of the cake, soaking up water to give a soft, bready crumb.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure as they set during cooking.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, helping the cakes rise and turn light.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the cakes brown lightly on the surface.

The step that matters

Cook over low heat until done. Low heat lets the centre cook through before the outside browns or burns. Batter that is too hot on the outside can stay raw inside, so check that the cakes are set through.

“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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