Name: Yeast Cakes, or Preserved Yeast
Ingredients: 2 quarts boiling water; 1 large handful of hops; 3 large potatoes; 2 pounds flour; 2 tablespoons coarse sea salt; ½ teacup sugar; 1 pint good yeast; as much Indian meal as needed

Why it works: Flour and sugar 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 ↓

Yeast Cakes, or Preserved Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Make the starter

Boil the hops in 2 quarts of boiling water.
Cook the potatoes until tender, then mash them.
Add the mashed potatoes to 2 pounds of flour.
Pour the boiling hop water over the flour through a sieve and beat until smooth.
While warm, stir in 2 tablespoons of coarse sea salt and ½ teacup of sugar.
Before it cools, mix in 1 pint of good yeast.
Once the yeast is light, stir in enough Indian meal to form a dough.

Dry and store

Roll out the dough into cakes and place them on a cloth in a dry place, turning them daily.
After a week or ten days, store the cakes in a bag in a dry place.
To use, soak one cake in warm water, mash it smooth, and use as yeast.

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.

Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together92,116 recipes

Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).
Potato + flourtop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together5,355 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Potato + sugartop 30% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together3,032 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
Hops + flourtop 32% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together10 recipes

Shared aroma: eugenol (clove, spicy).
Hops + potatotop 39% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together3 recipes

Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Hops: Boiled in the water to add bitterness and aroma that help preserve the yeast.
Potatoes: Mashed into the dough to add starch and moisture that feed the yeast.
Flour: Forms the body of the dough and gives the cakes their structure.
Yeast: Provides the living cultures that make the dough rise and ferment.
Sugar: Feeds the yeast, speeding fermentation and rising.

The step that matters

Mixing in the yeast before the mixture cools. Yeast works best at warm temperatures. If the mixture has cooled too much, the yeast will be sluggish or may not activate well, so the dough may fail to rise.

Swap the potato

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

Mustardfits better
Arrowrootfits better
Parsnipfits better
Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against hops, flour, sugar. 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.

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Yeast Cakes, or Preserved Yeast