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Brown Nut Bread

A loaf of bread made with graham flour, white flour, sugar, black molasses, milk, walnuts, salt, and baking soda.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and molasses are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,225 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Brown Nut Bread

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

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

Mix and bake

  1. Mix the baking soda with the black molasses until it foams.

  2. In a large bowl, combine the graham flour, white flour, sugar, milk, chopped walnuts, and salt.

  3. Add the foamed molasses mixture to the dry ingredients and stir until well combined.

  4. Pour the batter into a greased loaf pan.

  5. Bake for about 1 hour or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

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. Sugar + molassestop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,225 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Flour + walnuttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Milk + walnuttop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,236 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Graham flour
Provides the coarse, hearty structure and brown color of the loaf.
Black molasses
Adds moisture, sweetness, and a dark color to the crumb.
Baking soda
Reacts with the molasses to release gas, lifting the batter as it bakes.
Walnuts
Add texture and a rich, slightly oily body to the loaf.

The step that matters

Foaming the baking soda into the molasses. The soda must react with the acidic molasses before the batter goes in, so the gas is trapped as the loaf sets. Stirring it in late or skipping the foam leaves a dense, poorly risen bread.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Hazelnutfits about as well
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar, molasses, 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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