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Bread

Date Brown Bread

A loaf of bread made with dates, graham flour, sour milk, and brown sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Date Brown Bread

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 300°F (150°C).

  2. In a bowl, combine the graham flour, baking soda, and salt.

  3. Rub the dates into the dry flour mixture.

  4. In another bowl, mix the sour milk, brown sugar, and egg.

  5. Stir the wet ingredients into the dry mixture until combined.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into a greased loaf pan.

  2. Bake for 1 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 + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 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. Milk + datestop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together470 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + datestop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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
Forms the bread's structure and gives it a coarse, hearty texture.
Sour milk
Its acidity reacts with the baking soda so the bread rises, and it adds moisture.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the sour milk to produce gas that lifts the loaf.
Dates
Add sweetness, moisture and chewy pockets throughout the crumb.
Egg
Binds the batter and helps give the loaf its set structure.

The step that matters

Stir the wet ingredients into the dry mixture until combined. Overmixing develops gluten and tunnels the crumb, while the baking soda starts reacting as soon as it meets the acidic sour milk, so the batter should be mixed just until no dry flour remains and baked promptly.

Swap the dates

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Datesthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, milk, 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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