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Dessert

Potato Flour Cakes

A small cake made with potato flour, wheatmeal, butter, sugar, bitter almonds, lemon juice, and egg.

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

Potato Flour Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the batter

  1. Cream the butter by beating it with a wooden spoon until creamy.

  2. Add the beaten egg and lemon juice to the butter.

  3. Mix in the sugar, wheatmeal, potato flour, and ground bitter almonds.

  4. Beat the mixture for 20 to 30 minutes.

Bake

  1. Drop small lumps of the mixture onto floured baking sheets.

  2. Bake the cakes at 400°F (200°C) for 10 to 15 minutes.

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. Lemon + almondtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Potato + almondtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together337 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Butter + almondtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,245 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  5. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Butter
Creamed with sugar to trap air and give the cakes a tender, rich texture.
Egg
Binds the mixture and adds structure and richness to the cakes.
Potato flour
Gives the cakes a light, tender crumb because it contains no gluten.
Wheatmeal
Provides gluten-forming structure and body to hold the cakes together.
Castor sugar
Sweetens the cakes and helps create a light, aerated batter when beaten.

The step that matters

Beat the mixture for 20 to 30 minutes. Long beating incorporates air into the fat-and-sugar batter, which lifts the cakes. Under-beating leaves them dense, while the batter must stay cohesive enough to hold its shape when dropped.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Sweet potatofits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar, butter, lemon, almond, egg. 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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