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Dessert

Common Bread Cake

A sweet bread cake made with butter, sugar, currants, and milk, baked in a pan.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Common Bread Cake

Ingredients

Directions

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

  2. Knead in the butter, sugar, and currants.

  3. Warm the butter in the milk before adding it to the dough.

  4. Bake in a pan rather than as 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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Currant + milktop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,475 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  3. Butter + curranttop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,856 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  4. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Sugar and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Dough
Forms the base structure that traps the gas and holds the cake together.
Butter
Adds fat for a richer, more tender crumb.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the crust brown.
Currants
Provide fruit flavour and pockets of sweetness throughout the bread.
Milk
Adds moisture and softness to the dough.

The step that matters

Warm the butter in the milk before adding it to the dough. Melting the butter into warm milk helps it disperse evenly through the dough, so the fat coats the flour proteins and gives a more uniform, tender texture instead of greasy pockets.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, milk. 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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