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Bread

Diet-bread Another Way

A diet bread made with flour, sugar, eggs, and nutmeg baked in the oven.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and nutmeg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 18,623 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Diet-bread Another Way

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.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. In a bowl, beat the egg yolks and whites separately.

Mix and bake

  1. Mix the flour, sugar, beaten eggs, and nutmeg together with a wooden spoon until well combined.

  2. Pour the mixture into a baking dish and bake for one hour.

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. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Egg + nutmegtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together24,744 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  5. Sugar + nutmegtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together23,364 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Flour and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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

Flour
Provides the structure that the eggs set and holds the loaf together.
Eggs
Bind the batter and set as it bakes, and beaten whites add lift.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the crust brown as it bakes.
Nutmeg
Adds warm aroma to the bread.

The step that matters

Mixing until well combined. The batter must be evenly mixed so the eggs, flour and sugar set uniformly in the oven. Pockets of unmixed flour or egg can leave dense or streaky spots in the baked loaf.

Swap the nutmeg

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

  1. Jalapenofits better
  2. Cinnamonfits about as well
  3. Nutmegthe original
  4. Capersfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar, egg. 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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