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Dessert

Oat and Cokn Flovk Cake

A cake made with oat flour, corn flour, sugar, eggs, lemon juice, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and corn are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,165 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Oat and Cokn Flovk Cake

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. Separate the egg whites and yolks.

  2. Beat the yolks until thick and light lemon color.

  3. Gradually beat in the sugar, then add the lemon juice and salt.

  4. Fold in the stiffly beaten egg whites and the flours alternately.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into an ungreased pan.

  2. Bake in a moderate oven at 350°F (175°C) for 35 to 40 minutes.

  3. Increase the temperature to 400°F (200°C) when the cake is about half done.

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 + corntop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,165 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Corn + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,927 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 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 whites and yolks trap air and set the cake's structure as it bakes.
Oat flour
Provides the main flour structure and a tender, mild, slightly nutty crumb.
Corn flour
Adds tenderness and a fine crumb, with less gluten to toughen the cake.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps stabilize the beaten yolks and whites.

The step that matters

Folding the egg whites and flours. Stiffly beaten whites hold the air that lifts the cake. Overmixing or deflating them while alternating in the flours makes the cake dense and flat.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Blueberryfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, corn, 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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