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Dessert

Rice Cake, with Butter

A buttery cake made with rice flour, all-purpose flour, sugar, eggs, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Rice Cake, with Butter

Oven, in the book's wordsA slack oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Melt the butter until creamy.

  2. Add the pounded sugar and stir until light.

  3. Break in the eggs three at a time, stirring continuously.

  4. Once the eggs are fully incorporated, add the rice flour and all-purpose flour.

Bake

  1. Bake in a hoop pan like a plum cake.

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + ricetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,645 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Flour + ricetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,611 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

Butter
Adds richness and a tender, fine crumb when creamed.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps trap air when beaten until light.
Eggs
Provide structure and lift as they bind the batter and hold air.
All-purpose flour
Forms the gluten network that gives the cake its body.
Rice flour
Adds a lighter, more delicate texture than wheat flour alone.

The step that matters

Adding the eggs gradually. Adding eggs one or a few at a time while stirring continuously keeps the batter emulsified. If eggs go in too quickly, the batter can curdle and lose the air trapped by creaming, leading to a denser cake.

“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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