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Dessert

Potato Cake— No. 2

A sweet cake made with mashed potatoes, chocolate, nuts, and spices, baked in a loaf pan.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Potato Cake— No. 2

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Cream the butter and sugar together.

  2. Add the yolks of the eggs, beaten lightly.

  3. Mix in the mashed potatoes, chocolate, milk, spices, vanilla, nuts, and sifted baking powder into the flour.

  4. Lastly, fold in the beaten egg whites.

Bake

  1. Bake in a loaf or layer 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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Allspice + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Allspice + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Yolks enrich the batter and whites, folded in last, lighten and give the cake structure.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake together as it bakes.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, helping the cake rise and turn light.
Butter
Creaming with sugar traps air and adds richness and tenderness.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and, creamed with butter, helps give it a fine texture.
Mashed potatoes
Add moisture and a soft, tender crumb to the cake.

The step that matters

Fold in the beaten egg whites last. Folding gently keeps the air whipped into the egg whites. Stirring them in hard deflates the batter, so the cake rises less and bakes up denser.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, egg, chocolate, milk, allspice, clove, cinnamon):

  1. Sweet potatofits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Arrowrootfits about as well
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, egg, chocolate, milk, allspice, clove, 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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