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Bread

Cinnamon Bread

A sweet loaf made with cinnamon, brown sugar, butter, eggs, and a glaze of egg white and powdered sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Wheat and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 537 recipes. Both carry 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol, which smells smoky, clove. The science ↓

Cinnamon Bread

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Prepare 2 pounds of dough as for wheat bread and let it rise until very light.

  2. Melt ¼ pound of butter in ½ cup of milk and beat in 3 eggs. Incorporate the butter, milk, and eggs into the dough.

  3. Dissolve ¼ teaspoon of baking soda in tepid water and mix it into the dough.

Make the cinnamon filling

  1. In a bowl, mix 1 pint of brown sugar with ½ cup of sweet butter to form a stiff paste. Flavor the mixture with 2 tablespoons of ground cinnamon.

Shape, bake and glaze

  1. Shape the dough into a round loaf and make deep incisions on the surface. Fill the incisions with the cinnamon mixture and close the openings.

  2. Bake the loaf as you would other bread.

  3. When done, glaze it with the egg white and powdered sugar.

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. Wheat + cinnamontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together537 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol (smoky, clove).

  2. Wheat + milktop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  3. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

Dough
Forms the bread's structure and airy crumb as it rises.
Eggs
Add richness, structure and colour to the enriched dough.
Brown sugar
Sweetens the filling and keeps it moist and sticky.
Sweet butter
Adds fat and richness, binding the sugar into a stiff paste.
Ground cinnamon
Provides the dominant spiced aroma and flavour of the filling.
Butter
Enriches the dough with fat, tenderising the crumb and adding flavour.

The step that matters

Filling the incisions and closing the openings. If the cuts are too shallow or the openings are not sealed, the sugar-butter filling can leak out during baking and burn, leaving the loaf dry inside.

“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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