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Rock Cakes

A sweet cake made with flour, baking powder, lard, sugar, eggs, currants, peel, essence, egg color, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Rock Cakes

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 ↓

Rock Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Mix flour and baking powder in a bowl.

  2. Rub in lard until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs.

Make and bake

  1. Add sugar, eggs, and milk gradually, mixing until combined.

  2. Form a stiff dough and lay out with a fork on baking sheets.

  3. Bake at 430°F (220°C) until golden brown.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Currant + milktop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,475 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  5. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, 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

Flour
Forms the structure that holds the cakes together as they bake.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking so the cakes rise and become light.
Lard or compound
Rubbed into flour to shorten the crumb and give a tender texture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the cakes brown as they bake.
Eggs
Bind the dough and add richness and structure.
Milk
Adds moisture that hydrates the flour and forms the dough.

The step that matters

Forming the stiff dough. Adding the milk gradually and stopping once the dough is stiff keeps it from becoming wet and sticky. Overmixing develops gluten and can make the cakes tough, so mix only until combined.

Swap the currant

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

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

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