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Dessert

Lister's Little Cakes

Small cakes made with Lister's Diabetic Flour and eggs, baked at 350°F.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 106,462 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Lister's Little Cakes

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderately hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a moderately hot oven”. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare the batter

  1. Beat the eggs until very stiff.

  2. Gently stir in the box of Lister's Diabetic Flour without further beating.

Bake

  1. Grease a flat baking pan slightly.

  2. Drop small amounts of the batter onto the pan, about the size of a 50‑cent piece.

  3. Bake in a moderate oven at 350°F (175°C) for about ten minutes.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Eggs
Whipped stiff, they trap air and give the cakes their light, airy structure.
Lister's diabetic flour
Provides the dry structure that the whipped egg foam is folded into to set the cakes.

The step that matters

Gently stir in the flour without further beating. Whipped egg foam holds air that gives the cakes lift. Vigorous stirring after the flour goes in knocks that air out, leaving dense, flat cakes.

“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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