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Vermont Yeast Cakes

A yeast-based cake made from wheat flour, cornmeal, and lukewarm water, dried and soaked before use.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Wheat and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,373 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Vermont Yeast Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Mix wheat flour with enough water to make a thick batter.

  2. Let the batter rise until light.

  3. Stir in cornmeal to form a stiff dough.

  4. Allow the dough to rise again.

Dry and store

  1. Roll the dough very thin and cut into 3-inch squares.

  2. Dry the squares in the shade on a clear, windy day until perfectly dry.

  3. Tie the dried squares in a bag and hang in a cool, dry place.

Use the yeast

  1. Soak one cake in 1 pint of lukewarm water until dissolved.

  2. Proceed as with other yeast.

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. Wheat + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,373 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Wheat flour
Forms the batter and dough that carry the yeast culture and hold the cakes together.
Cornmeal
Stiffens the dough so it can be rolled thin and cut into squares.
Lukewarm water
Hydrates the flour and dissolves the dried cake so the yeast can become active.

The step that matters

Drying the squares completely. Yeast cakes must be dried until perfectly dry so they keep for storage. Any remaining moisture lets live microbes multiply and spoil the cakes before use.

“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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