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Dessert

Common Bread Cake

A sweet bread cake made with dough, butter, sugar, currants, milk, optional butter or sugar, eggs, and raw cream.

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

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

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

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

  3. Warm the butter in 1 cup of good milk.

  4. Optionally, add 1 ounce of butter or sugar, or 1 or 2 eggs to improve the cake.

  5. Optionally, add 1 cup of raw cream for better flavor.

  6. Bake in a pan rather than as a loaf to keep the outside less hard.

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

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

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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 and chewy crumb of the cake.
Butter
Adds richness and tenderness through fat.
Currants
Provide sweetness and fruity bursts throughout the cake.
Milk
Adds moisture and softens the dough.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, 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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