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Swedish Timbale Cases

A small fried batter cake made with egg, milk, flour, salt, and olive oil, cooked in a timbale iron.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Wheat and olive match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,100 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

Swedish Timbale Cases

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Beat the egg until light with a whisk.

  2. Add the milk and salt, then stir in the flour until smooth.

  3. Mix in the olive oil and let the batter stand for one hour, stirring gently occasionally.

Fry

  1. Heat fat in a small kettle and place the timbale iron in it for about five minutes.

  2. Fill a cup three-quarters full with batter, lift the hot iron, let excess fat run off, dip into the batter, then quickly place it in the hot fat 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.

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 + olivetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,100 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  2. Milk + wheattop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,418 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + olivetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,828 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

Milk and flour 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

Egg
Adds structure and richness, helping the batter set into a firm, crisp shell.
Winter wheat flour
Provides the main structure, with gluten and starch setting the batter as it fries.
Milk
Adds moisture and helps form a thin, tender batter that coats the iron.
Olive oil
Adds fat that gives the fried shell a tender texture and richer flavour.

The step that matters

Dipping the hot iron into the batter and then into the hot fat. The batter sets on contact with the hot metal, so the iron must be fully heated and the excess fat drained. Moving quickly from batter to hot fat keeps the batter from sliding off or soaking up grease.

“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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