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Irish Potato Cakes

Irish potato cakes are baked mashed potato cakes with sweet cream and flour, seasoned with coarse sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Potato and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,355 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Irish Potato Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Combine boiled, mashed potatoes and sweet cream in a bowl.

  2. Add coarse sea salt to taste.

  3. Stir in enough flour to form a paste.

Bake

  1. Shape the mixture and bake on a board before the fire or in a floured tin pan.

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. Potato + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,355 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Potato + creamtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  3. Cream + flourtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Potatoes
Provide the bulk and starch that give the cakes their soft, tender body.
Sweet cream
Adds fat and moisture, making the mixture richer and softer.
Flour
Binds the mash into a workable paste that holds its shape.

The step that matters

Stirring in the flour. Adding too much flour makes the cakes dense and tough, because gluten develops as the dough is worked. Add it gradually, just until the mixture forms a paste that holds its shape.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cream, flour):

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, 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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