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Potato Fried Cakes

Fried cakes made from mashed potatoes, sugar, milk, shortening, eggs, baking powder, salt, nutmeg, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Potato and nutmeg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,052 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Potato Fried Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. In a bowl, combine mashed potatoes, sugar, milk, shortening, eggs, baking powder, salt, and nutmeg.

  2. Gradually add flour until a soft dough forms.

Shape and fry

  1. Shape the dough into cakes.

  2. Fry in hot oil until golden brown on both sides.

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 + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,052 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Potato + milktop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Mashed potatoes
Adds moisture and body, giving the dough a tender, soft crumb.
Eggs
Bind the dough and add structure as they set during frying.
Baking powder
Releases gas that lifts the cakes so they puff and stay light.
Sugar
Sweetens the cakes and helps the surface brown in the hot oil.
Shortening
Adds fat that softens the texture and keeps the cakes tender.
Flour
Provides the main structure once it is worked into a soft dough.

The step that matters

Adding the flour. Flour should be added gradually until the dough is soft but still workable. Too much flour makes the cakes dense and tough, while too little leaves them sticky and hard to shape.

Swap the potato

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

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

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