Name: Common Bread Cake
Ingredients: 1 quartern loaf of bread dough; 2 ounces butter; 2 ounces Lisbon sugar; 8 ounces currants; 1 tea-cupful good milk; 1 tea-cupful raw cream (optional)

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 cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

Take a portion of bread dough equivalent to a quarter loaf.
Knead in the butter, sugar, and currants.
Warm the butter in the milk.

Bake

Optionally, add more butter or sugar for better flavor.
Optionally, add raw cream for improvement.
Bake in a pan until done.

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.

Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together27,232 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).
Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together81,283 recipes

Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).
Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together41,516 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).
Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

Bread dough: Provides the yeasted, bread-like structure and chewy crumb of the cake.
Butter: Adds fat for richness and a tender crumb, and softens the dough.
Sugar: Adds sweetness and helps the crust brown during baking.
Currants: Add sweet, fruity pockets of flavor and moisture throughout the dough.
Milk: Adds moisture and richness to the dough and helps carry the warmed butter through it.

Swap the currant

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

Vanillafits better
Peachfits better
Figfits better
Currantthe original

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