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Dessert

Diet Bread Cakes

A light cake made with eggs, sugar, flour, and optional caraway seeds, baked until dry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and caraway match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,435 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Diet Bread Cakes

Oven, in the book's wordsA warm oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a warm oven”. The 350°F in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Make the batter

  1. In a deep earthen or copper pan, whisk together the eggs and egg yolks to break them.

  2. In a small saucepan, combine the sugar and water; bring to a boil.

  3. Pour the boiling sugar mixture into the eggs while whisking continuously until cool.

  4. Gently fold in the flour until just combined.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour the batter into square tins lined with paper and dust the tops with sifted sugar.

  2. Bake in a warm oven (350°F / 175°C) until the tops are dry and firm.

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 + carawaytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,435 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. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + carawaytop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,409 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Egg and flour 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
Whisked eggs and yolks trap air and set into the cake's structure as they bake.
Lump sugar
Sweetens the cake and, dissolved into boiling water, helps build a stable foamy batter.
Flour
Provides the starch and gluten that give the baked cake its body and crumb.

The step that matters

Whisking the boiling sugar into the eggs. Pouring the syrup in slowly while whisking constantly keeps the eggs from scrambling and lets them foam. Beating in the hot syrup cooks the egg proteins gently, which helps the batter hold its air.

Swap the caraway

The recipe marks caraway as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, sugar, flour):

  1. Jalapenofits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Carawaythe original

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