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Dessert

Rout Drop Cakes

A sweet drop cake made with flour, butter, sugar, currants, eggs, rose water, peach water, sweet wine, and brandy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Currant and rose work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 494 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Rout Drop 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. In a large bowl, mix the flour, butter, sugar, and currants.

  2. In a separate bowl, whisk the eggs and add the rose water, peach water, sweet wine, and brandy.

  3. Combine the wet mixture with the dry ingredients to form a stiff paste.

Bake

  1. Drop spoonfuls of the mixture onto floured tin plates.

  2. Bake in a preheated oven at 400°F (200°C) for a short time until golden.

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. Currant + rosetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together494 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,645 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  4. Peach + winetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together218 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  5. Butter + peachtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together860 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, 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

All-purpose flour
Provides the structure that holds the stiff paste together as it bakes.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and richness, and helps the cakes brown.
Sugar
Sweetens the cakes and contributes to browning at the surface.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and add moisture and structure to the cakes.
Currants
Add pockets of concentrated fruit sweetness and tartness throughout.

The step that matters

Baking until golden. The batter is a stiff paste and the baking time is short, so the cakes can go from pale to overbaked quickly. Watching for golden color rather than relying only on time keeps them tender and prevents dryness and excess browning.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, butter, sugar, egg, rose, peach, wine):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raspberryfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, sugar, egg, rose, peach, wine. 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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