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Bread

Bread Cakes

A batter of stale bread, sour milk, eggs, sugar, salt, baking soda, and flour baked into golden cakes.

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

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 ↓

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. To the bread mixture, add 2 egg yolks, 1 teaspoon salt, 1 teaspoon baking soda, 2 tablespoons sugar, and enough flour to make a batter slightly thicker than for buckwheat cakes.

  4. Fold in the beaten egg whites and mix gently.

Bake

  1. Bake the batter until golden brown.

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. 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. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 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
Provides the base of the batter and absorbs the sour milk to soften into a smooth mixture.
Sour milk
Softens the bread and its acidity reacts with the baking soda to help the batter rise.
Egg yolks
Add richness and help bind the batter.
Baking soda
Reacts with the sour milk's acidity to produce gas that lightens the batter.
Egg whites
Beaten and folded in, they trap air that helps the cakes rise and stay light.
Flour
Adds structure so the batter holds its shape while baking.

The step that matters

Folding in the beaten egg whites. Stirring too vigorously deflates the air bubbles in the beaten whites, so the cakes will bake up denser and less light. Mix gently until just combined.

“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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