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Dessert

Potato Fried Cakes

A sweet fried cake made from mashed potatoes, eggs, butter, sugar, flour, baking powder, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and cinnamon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,341 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Potato Fried Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. Boil and mash the potatoes.

  2. Add butter, sugar, eggs, and 2 cups of flour mixed with salt and baking powder.

  3. Mix until a soft dough forms, adding more flour as needed.

Shape and fry

  1. Turn the dough onto a floured board and roll it out to ½ inch thick.

  2. Cut into desired shapes and fry until golden.

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. Flour + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Potato + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,012 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Potato + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,456 recipes

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

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Potatoes
Provide starch and moisture that give the fritters a soft, tender crumb.
Eggs
Bind the dough and add structure as they set during frying.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a tender texture.
Baking powder
Releases gas that helps the fritters rise and become light.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the surface brown to a golden colour.
Flour
Provides the main structure that holds the dough together.

The step that matters

Adding flour to the dough. Too much flour makes the dough dense and tough, while too little leaves it sticky and hard to shape. Add flour gradually and stop once the dough is soft and workable.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Sweet potatofits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Potatothe original

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