Skip to main content
Dessert

Russian Cake

A cake made with egg yolks, sugar, flour, almonds, anise seed, and egg whites, baked until crisp.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Flour and almond are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,673 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Russian Cake

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the batter

  1. Mix the yolks of 5 eggs with ½ pound of sugar.

  2. Slowly add 3 ounces of flour and 1 ounce of chopped almonds.

  3. Stir in 1 tablespoon of anise seed and the beaten egg whites.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake in long narrow tins lined with paper at 350°F (175°C) until crisp.

  2. Cut into slices and dry in the oven before serving.

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. Flour + almondtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Almond + anisetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together55 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  3. Flour + anisetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together270 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, 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 and add richness and tenderness to the cake.
Egg whites
Beaten into the batter to lighten it and give the cake its airy structure.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake together as it bakes.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps the crumb brown during baking.
Chopped almonds
Add nutty flavor and a bit of texture to the crumb.

The step that matters

Drying the slices in the oven. Slices need to dry long enough to become crisp all the way through. Too little drying leaves them soft, since low moisture is what makes baked cake crisp and crunchy.

Swap the anise

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, sugar, flour, almond):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Jalapenofits about as well
  4. Anisethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sugar, flour, almond. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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.

You might also like

Almond Sponge CakeAlmond Sponge Cake26 recipesAlmond CustardAlmond Custard22 recipesAlmond WafersAlmond Wafers22 recipesCoconut Almond CakeCoconut Almond Cake17 recipes