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Bread

Common Bread Cake

A sweet bread cake made from white bread dough, butter, sugar, currants, and optional eggs or cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Common Bread Cake

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. Take a quantity of dough from a quarter loaf of white bread.

  2. Knead in 2 ounces of butter, 2 ounces of sugar, and 8 ounces of currants.

  3. Warm the butter in ½ cup of good milk.

Finish and bake

  1. Optionally, add 1 ounce of butter or sugar, or 1 or 2 eggs for better texture.

  2. Optionally, add ½ cup of raw cream for improved flavor.

  3. Bake in a pan instead of a loaf for a softer crust.

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 + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

White bread dough
Provides the yeasted, bread-like structure and crumb of the cake.
Butter
Adds richness and a tender, short texture to the dough.
Sugar
Sweetens the dough and helps the crust brown.
Currants
Add pockets of fruity sweetness and a chewy texture throughout.
Milk
Adds moisture and softness to the dough.

The step that matters

Knead in the butter, sugar and currants. Fat and sugar coat the gluten strands and slow their development. A thorough but gentle knead spreads them evenly without overworking the dough, which keeps the crumb soft and the currants evenly distributed.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, butter, sugar, tea, milk, egg, cream):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Peachfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, butter, sugar, tea, milk, egg, cream. 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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