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Dessert

Brown Cakes

Brown cakes are fried cakes made from a soft dough of sugar, butter, eggs, milk, flour, baking soda, salt, and mace.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Brown Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Cream together the sugar and butter.

  2. Beat in the eggs and milk.

  3. Add baking soda, salt, and mace.

  4. Mix in enough flour to form a soft dough.

Fry and finish

  1. Roll out the dough and cut into small cakes.

  2. Fry the cakes in boiling lard, turning them over until golden.

  3. Remove with a fork and let excess lard drip off.

  4. Dust with sugar while hot.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

Eggs
Bind the dough and add richness and structure to the cakes.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, tenderizing the dough and carrying flavor.
Baking soda
Reacts with the dough to help it rise and brown during frying.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the soft dough together.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the cakes brown when fried.

The step that matters

Fry the cakes in boiling lard. The lard must be hot enough to brown the outside quickly. If it is too cool, the cakes absorb excess fat and turn greasy before they turn golden.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Jalapenofits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, egg, milk, 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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