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Nora's Bread Cakes

A quick bread cake made from soaked bread, sour milk, egg, baking soda, salt, and flour, baked on a griddle.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,466 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

Nora's Bread Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. Soak pieces of bread in sour milk until soft.

  2. Rub the soaked bread through a colander and add a little more sour milk.

  3. To about 2 quarts of this mixture, add 1 well-beaten egg, ¼ teaspoon salt, and 1 teaspoon baking soda.

  4. Stir in flour to make a batter slightly thicker than pancake batter.

Bake

  1. Bake on a griddle.

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, 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

Pieces of bread
Provide the bulk and body of the batter as they soften in sour milk.
Sour milk
Softens the bread and adds acidity that reacts with the baking soda.
Egg
Binds the batter and adds structure to the cakes.
Baking soda
Reacts with the sour milk's acid to produce gas, helping the cakes rise.
Flour
Thickens the batter so it holds its shape on the griddle.

The step that matters

Stir in flour to a batter thicker than pancake batter. Flour thickens the batter and sets its structure. If the batter is too thin, the cakes spread and may not hold their shape or rise well on the griddle.

“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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