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Egg Bread

Egg Bread is a simple loaf made with meal, eggs, water, lard, buttermilk, baking soda, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and buttermilk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 25% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,986 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Egg Bread

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, combine 2 cups of meal, 2 eggs, 1 cup of cold water, and 1 cup of boiling water.

  2. Add lard the size of an egg and mix well.

  3. In another bowl, mix 1 pint of meal with 1 pint of buttermilk.

  4. Stir in 1 teaspoon of baking soda and salt to taste.

  5. Add 1 tablespoon of lard and combine all ingredients.

Bake

  1. Pour the mixture into a greased baking dish and bake at 350°F (175°C) until golden brown.

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. Egg + buttermilktop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,986 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Meal
Forms the bulk and structure of the bread.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure as they set in the oven.
Buttermilk
Adds acidity and moisture, and reacts with the baking soda.
Baking soda
Reacts with the buttermilk's acid to release gas, helping the bread rise.
Lard
Adds fat for tenderness and moisture in the crumb.

The step that matters

Stir in the baking soda and bake promptly. Baking soda reacts with the acid in buttermilk to release carbon dioxide gas. That gas lifts the batter, and much of it escapes if the batter waits, so the mixture should go into the oven soon after the soda is added.

“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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