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Bread

Plain Short Crust

A simple yeast bread made with flour, egg, sugar, yeast, water, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Plain Short Crust

Oven, in the book's wordsA brisk oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Rub 4 ounces of fine flour into 10 ounces of fine flour.

  2. Add 1 egg and 1 ounce of sugar, mixing well.

  3. Make a hole in the center of a trough filled with 1 pint of yeast strained through a sieve and mixed with 1 pint of warm water.

  4. Stir a small quantity of flour into the yeast mixture, leaving the rest to prove in the hole.

  5. Set in a warm place for 1 hour to see if it rises.

  6. Mix the whole with 2 quarts of lukewarm water and a pinch of salt.

Prove and bake

  1. Knead to a proper thickness and let it rise again for 1 hour.

  2. Knead again and bake in a brisk oven.

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 + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

Flour and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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 flour
Forms the gluten network that gives the bread its structure.
Yeast
Produces gas that makes the dough rise.
Egg
Adds richness and helps bind the dough.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast and adds a little sweetness and browning.

The step that matters

Stir a small quantity of flour into the yeast mixture, leaving the rest to prove in the hole.. The yeast needs to be active before it is mixed into the full dough. A warm, well-fed yeast sponge rises visibly, showing the yeast is alive, which is why the rest is left to prove in the well.

“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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