Skip to main content
Main

Yeast Cakes

A yeast-leavened cake made with potatoes, hops, sugar, ginger, cornmeal, flour, yeast, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Potato and ginger work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 992 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Yeast Cakes

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the potato water

  1. Peel the potatoes.

  2. Cook them with the hops tied in a cloth in 1½ quarts of water.

  3. Mash the potatoes.

  4. Let them cool.

Make the dough

  1. Pour the potato water over the cup of flour.

  2. Add the dissolved yeast, sugar, salt, ginger, and mashed potatoes.

  3. Mix well.

  4. Add enough cornmeal to stiffen the mixture.

  5. Let it rise.

Shape

  1. Shape into bulk.

  2. Cut into oblong cakes.

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 + gingertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together992 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Potato + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,355 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Ginger + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,564 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + gingertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Sugar and ginger barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 14,054 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
Mashed into the dough, they add starch and moisture that give the cakes a soft crumb.
Hops
Steeped in the cooking water, they add a bitter, aromatic flavour that balances the sugar.
Flour
Forms the base of the dough structure when mixed with the potato water.
Dissolved yeast
Ferments the dough so it rises and becomes light and airy.
Cornmeal
Added to stiffen the mixture, giving the dough body and a slightly gritty texture.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast and adds sweetness to the cakes.

The step that matters

Let it rise. The yeast needs warm, undisturbed time to ferment; if the dough is under-proofed the cakes will be dense, and over-proofing can make them collapse.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (hops, sugar, ginger, flour):

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Parsnipfits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against hops, sugar, ginger, 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.

You might also like

Potato CroquettesPotato Croquettes255 recipesPotato RollsPotato Rolls78 recipesPotato ChipsPotato Chips53 recipesSweet Potato CroquettesSweet Potato Croquettes53 recipes