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Dessert

Potato Torte

A sweet cake made with mashed potatoes, butter, sugar, chocolate, nuts, and lemon rind, baked in layers.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Chocolate and nuts work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 440 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Potato Torte

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Beat the butter until creamy.

  2. Gradually add the sugar and mix well.

  3. Incorporate the beaten egg yolks and mashed potatoes.

  4. Stir in the grated chocolate, chopped nuts, and lemon rind.

  5. Sift the flour with baking powder and fold into the mixture.

  6. Gently fold in the beaten egg whites.

Bake and assemble

  1. Pour into three-layer cake pans or a loaf pan.

  2. Bake layers for about 15 minutes and the loaf for about 45 minutes.

  3. Assemble layers with fruit jelly and cover the outside with mocha frosting.

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. Chocolate + nutstop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together440 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Potato + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,230 recipes

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

  4. Potato + nutstop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together54 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  5. Sugar + chocolatetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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
Creams with the sugar to trap air and give a tender, rich crumb.
Sugar
Sweetens the batter and helps tenderize it when beaten with the butter.
Eggs
Yolks add richness and binding; beaten whites add air and structure.
Mashed potatoes
Adds moisture and a soft, moist texture to the crumb.
All-purpose flour
Provides the main structure that sets as the torte bakes.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking so the batter rises and lightens.

The step that matters

Gently fold in the beaten egg whites. Whites hold air that lifts the batter. Stirring vigorously deflates them, so the torte bakes up dense instead of light.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, egg, potato, chocolate, nuts, 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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