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Rice Cakes

Rice cakes are baked rice mixed with butter, eggs, flour, milk, cream, salt, sugar, and spice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Rice Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rice

  1. Boil the rice in water until soft.

  2. Add the butter and let the rice cool.

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, beat the egg yolks and mix in the flour, milk, and cream to form a thick batter.

  2. Fold in the beaten egg whites, salt, sugar, and spice.

Cook

  1. Bake the mixture on a griddle until golden brown.

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

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

  2. Rice + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Rice
Cooked and cooled, it forms the body of the cakes and gives them a soft, tender bite.
Eggs
Yolks bind the batter while whipped whites lighten it and help the cakes rise.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a tender texture, and helps browning on the griddle.
Flour
Thickens the batter so it holds together rather than spreading thin on the griddle.
Milk and cream
Supply moisture and richness, loosening the batter while keeping it thick.

The step that matters

Fold in the beaten egg whites. Whites hold air only when whipped to stiff peaks and folded gently. Overmixing deflates them, so the cakes turn dense instead of light.

“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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