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Bread

Bread Cakes

Bread cakes made from stale bread soaked in sour milk, eggs, salt, baking soda, flour, and beaten egg whites, baked on griddles.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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, and enough flour to create a thick batter.

Cook

  1. Fold in the beaten egg whites just before baking.

  2. Cook on hot griddles 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. 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 in sour milk, it softens and breaks down into the body of the batter.
Egg yolks
Add richness and help bind the batter together.
Egg whites
Beaten and folded in, they add air and lightness to the cakes.
Baking soda
Reacts with the sour milk's acidity to produce gas that helps the cakes rise and brown.
Flour
Adds structure so the batter holds its shape on the griddle.

The step that matters

Folding in the beaten egg whites. Egg whites hold air that gives lift, and that air slowly escapes as the batter sits. Folding them in gently just before cooking keeps the cakes light rather than dense.

Swap the buckwheat

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, milk, egg, 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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