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Dessert

Breakfast and Tea Cakes

A simple cake made with eggs, flour, and lard, baked in a preheated oven.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 106,462 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Breakfast and Tea Cakes

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a quick oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare

  1. Preheat your oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Grease 3 sets of gem pans well with lard.

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, break 3 eggs and beat them lightly with an egg whip.

  2. Add the beaten eggs to the batter just before baking.

  3. Fill the pans almost level full with batter.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake in the preheated oven for 15 minutes.

  2. Serve immediately with butter.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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
Provide structure and richness, setting as the batter bakes.
Flour
Forms the batter's main structure, giving the cakes their body once baked.
Lard
Greases the pans so the cakes release cleanly and brown at the edges.

The step that matters

Add the beaten eggs to the batter just before baking. Beaten eggs begin to lose their lift once mixed into batter and left standing. Adding them just before the batter goes into the hot oven helps the cakes rise and set properly.

“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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