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Bread

Royal Baking Powder Bread

A quick bread made with flour, salt, sugar, baking powder, potato, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Royal Baking Powder Bread

Ingredients

Directions

Mix the dough

  1. Sift together the flour, salt, sugar, and baking powder.

  2. Rub in the cold boiled potato.

  3. Add enough water to form a moist dough, about 1 pint for 1 quart of flour. Do not make a stiff dough.

Shape and bake

  1. Place the dough in a greased bread tin (4½ by 8 inches and 4 inches deep), filling it about ⅔ full.

  2. Bake until the loaf rises and fills the tin.

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. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  2. Flour + potatotop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,355 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Sugar + potatotop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Flour
Forms the structure that holds the loaf together as it bakes.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking, making the loaf rise without yeast.
Cold boiled potato
Its starch helps the bread stay moist and soft.

The step that matters

Keeping the dough moist, not stiff. A stiff dough does not hydrate the flour fully, so the starch and gluten stay tight and the loaf bakes up dense. Adding water to a soft, moist dough lets the baking powder gas expand the crumb evenly.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Beetrootfits better
  3. Sweet potatofits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar. 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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