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Bread

Indian Bannock

A simple baked bread made from fine meal, milk, eggs, sugar, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 88,785 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Indian Bannock

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the batter

  1. Scald 1 pint of fine meal in a pot, ensuring there are no lumps.

  2. Add 1 quart of milk, 6 eggs, 1 teaspoon of sugar, and ¼ teaspoon of salt to the meal. Mix well until combined.

Bake

  1. Pour the mixture into tin pans.

  2. Bake at 350°F (175°C) for 45 minutes.

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. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

  2. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

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

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

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Fine meal
Forms the main body of the bannock, thickening into a firm, starchy structure as it cooks.
Eggs
Bind the batter and help it set into a sliceable, custard-like texture when baked.
Milk
Adds moisture and hydrates the meal, keeping the bannock tender rather than dry.

The step that matters

Scalding the meal without lumps. Pouring hot liquid onto or into the meal lets the starch granules hydrate evenly. Lumps left in the scalded meal stay dry inside the batter and bake into streaks of uncooked starch that never fully blend.

“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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