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Dessert

Cakes

Small cakes made from a stiff paste of egg, sugar, flour, and boiled in lard, served with jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Beat the egg and sugar together.

  2. Add enough flour to form a stiff paste.

  3. Roll the paste thin, about the thickness of a dollar coin.

  4. Cut into small round or square shapes.

Fry and serve

  1. Drop 2 or 3 pieces at a time into boiling lard.

  2. When they rise and turn over, they are done.

  3. Remove with a skimmer and drain on an inverted sieve.

  4. Serve with a spoonful of jelly on each.

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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
Binds the dough and adds richness and structure to the cakes.
Flour
Forms the stiff paste that gives the cakes their body after frying.
Lard
Fries the cakes quickly in hot fat, producing a crisp, browned exterior.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the cakes brown in the hot fat.

The step that matters

Drop 2 or 3 pieces at a time into boiling lard. Adding too many pieces at once drops the lard temperature, so the cakes absorb more fat and turn greasy instead of crisp. Frying in small batches keeps the fat hot.

“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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