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Dessert

Common Bread Cake

A cake made from white bread dough, butter, sugar, currants, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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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 quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  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 ½ cup of good milk.

Enrich and bake

  1. For a richer cake, add an additional ounce of butter, sugar, or 1-2 eggs.

  2. A ½ cup of raw cream also improves the cake.

  3. Bake in a pan instead of 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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  3. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (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

White bread dough
Provides the gluten structure and yeast-raised crumb that the cake is built on.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a more tender crumb.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the crust brown during baking.
Currants
Add sweetness, fruit flavor, and chewy pockets throughout the cake.
Milk
Adds moisture and softness to the dough.

The step that matters

Kneading in the butter, sugar and currants. Fat and sugar slow gluten development in dough, so knead just until the additions are evenly distributed. Overworking can toughen the crumb, while uneven mixing leaves greasy or dense patches.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, 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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