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Dessert

Bice Cake

A cake made with ground rice, flour, sugar, eggs, lemon, and butter, baked at 350°F.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Rice and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,366 recipes. Both carry (e,e)-2,4-decadienal, which smells fatty, deep fried. The science ↓

Bice Cake

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Separate the egg whites from the yolks.

  2. Whisk the egg whites and yolks separately until well combined.

  3. Beat the butter until creamy, then mix it with the yolks.

Make the batter

  1. Stir in the flour, ground rice, and lemon (finely minced if using rind).

  2. Beat the mixture well, then fold in the egg whites.

  3. Pour the batter into a buttered mold or tin.

Bake

  1. Bake at 350°F (175°C) for nearly 1½ hours.

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. Rice + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,366 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Rice + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,645 recipes

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

Flour and butter 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

Eggs
Whites trapped by folding add lift, while yolks add richness and structure as the cake sets.
Butter
Creamed with the yolks, it adds fat for a tender crumb and rich flavour.
Flour
Provides the main structure that holds the cake together as it bakes.
Ground rice
Gives a finer, more delicate crumb than flour alone.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps give it a soft, moist texture.

The step that matters

Fold in the egg whites. Folding gently keeps the air beaten into the whites; stirring or deflating them makes the cake dense and flat.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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