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Dessert

Mush Cakes

A batter of water, meal, flour, milk, eggs, salt, and baking powder is boiled, cooled, folded, shaped into cakes, and fried.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Mush Cakes

Why it works: Flour and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Mush Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Boil the water and add the meal.

  2. Once cooled, mix in the flour, milk, salt, and egg yolks.

  3. Fold in the whipped egg whites and baking powder.

Fry

  1. Form the mixture into cakes and fry 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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

Flour and milk 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

Meal
Swells in boiling water to form a thick base that gives the cakes body.
Eggs
Yolks enrich and bind the batter, while whipped whites add lightness.
Baking powder
Releases gas when moistened and heated, lifting the batter.
Flour
Its proteins and starch build structure that holds the cakes together.
Milk
Adds moisture and richness, and its sugars help the surface brown.

The step that matters

Fold in the whipped egg whites and baking powder. Folding gently keeps the air trapped in the whites and the gas from the baking powder in the batter. Stirring vigorously deflates it, so the cakes turn out 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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