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Dessert

Small Potatoe Cakes

Small potato cakes made from roasted potatoes, butter, sugar, flour, egg yolks, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Small Potatoe Cakes

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the potatoes

  1. Roast the potatoes in ashes until cooked.

  2. Peel and remove any purple spots from the potatoes.

Make and shape the cakes

  1. Pound 12 fine potatoes with 4 ounces butter.

  2. Add 4 ounces pounded sugar, 2 ounces sifted flour, 2 egg yolks, and ¼ teaspoon salt.

  3. Form the mixture into a soft paste.

  4. Sprinkle flour on a working board and cut out cakes from the paste.

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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Potato + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,456 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Potato + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,355 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Potatoes
Form the bulk of the cakes, providing starch and body for the paste.
Butter
Adds richness and softness, helping the pounded potato hold together smoothly.
Egg yolks
Bind the mixture and add richness to the soft paste.
Flour
Adds structure so the paste can be cut into shapes.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the cakes brown lightly.

The step that matters

Forming the soft paste. The paste must be soft enough to mix evenly but firm enough to cut cleanly. Too much moisture makes it sticky, while too little flour or chilling leaves it crumbly and hard to shape.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Chivefits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Potatothe original

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