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Dessert

Farina Cake

A light cake made with eggs, sugar, farina, bread crumbs, nuts, baking powder, lemon and vanilla extracts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Nuts and vanilla work together. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 638 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Farina 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.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, beat the egg yolks with the sugar until very creamy.

  2. In another bowl, beat the egg whites until very stiff.

  3. Gently fold the beaten egg whites into the yolk and sugar mixture.

  4. Add the Farina, bread crumbs, chopped nuts, baking powder, lemon extract, and vanilla extract. Mix lightly.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into two layer cake pans with removable bottoms.

  2. Bake for 20 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. Nuts + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together638 recipes

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

  2. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  4. Lemon + vanillatop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,961 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Bread + vanillatop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together497 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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

Eggs
Whipped whites trap air, lifting the cake and giving it a light, airy structure.
Sugar
Sweetens the batter and helps stabilise the beaten yolks into a creamy mixture.
Farina
Adds body and a tender, slightly grainy texture to the crumb.
Bread crumbs
Add bulk and soft texture, absorbing moisture from the batter.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the oven, helping the cake rise.

The step that matters

Folding in the egg whites. Whipped whites hold air that gives the cake its lift. Folding gently preserves that air; stirring vigorously deflates the foam and leaves a dense cake.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, sugar, bread, nuts, vanilla):

  1. Figfits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Datesfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sugar, bread, nuts, vanilla. 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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