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Dessert

Swiss Roll or Baked Pancake

A rolled pancake made with powdered sugar, eggs, flour, and jam.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Swiss Roll or Baked Pancake

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a hot oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare

  1. Mix powdered sugar with the yolks of 4 eggs until light.

  2. Add ½ pound of flour and fold in the beaten egg whites.

  3. Line a dish with oiled paper.

  4. Sift sugar thickly inside the lined dish.

  5. Pour in the batter.

  6. Sift more sugar on top of the batter.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake for about 7 minutes at 400°F (200°C).

  2. Spread with jam, roll it up, and serve hot or cold, cut into slices.

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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 yolks
Enrich the batter with richness and help it set tender and moist.
Egg whites
Beaten and folded in, they trap air and give the batter lift.
Flour
Provides structure so the sponge holds its shape when rolled.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the sponge and helps it brown lightly on the surface.

The step that matters

Fold in the beaten egg whites. Folding gently keeps the air in the beaten whites. Stirring hard deflates the batter, leaving a dense roll that cracks when rolled.

“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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