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Breakfast and Tea Cakes

A savory cake made with butter, flour, cream, celery, herbs, egg yolks, and lobster, fried after battering.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Thyme and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Breakfast and Tea Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the lobster custard

  1. Combine butter, flour, cream, celery, salt, thyme, white pepper, and parsley in a stew-pan.

  2. Bring the mixture to a boil for 2 minutes.

  3. Add the egg yolks and lobster. Mix well and simmer for 5 minutes.

  4. Pour the mixture into a well-greased dish. Let it cool until firm.

Fry and serve

  1. Cut the cooled mixture into slices.

  2. Dip each slice in common batter. Fry the battered slices in hot lard until light brown.

  3. Serve garnished with fried parsley sprigs.

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. Thyme + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Celery + thymetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,193 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

Egg yolks
Thicken the cream mixture and help it set firm when cooled.
Lobster
Provides the main flavor and protein that forms the body of the cakes.
Flour
Thickens the cream with butter so the mixture holds its shape when sliced.
Cream
Adds moisture and richness, keeping the cakes tender inside.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and helps build the base of the thickened sauce.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool until firm before slicing. Egg yolks and flour thicken the cream as it cools, so cutting too early makes slices soft and likely to break apart in the batter and hot lard.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, cream, celery, thyme, parsley, egg):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, cream, celery, thyme, parsley, 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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