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Dessert

Rice-Cake

A cake made from sifted rice flour, sugar, eggs, and flavored with ratafia, orange flower water, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Rice-Cake

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a quick oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Make the batter

  1. Mix the rice flour and loaf sugar together.

  2. Add the whisked eggs, ratafia, orange flower water, and essence of lemon or lemon rind.

  3. Beat the mixture together for 20 minutes.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into a prepared hoop.

  2. Bake in a 400°F (200°C) oven.

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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Rice + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,366 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  3. Rice + orangetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and egg 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

Rice flour
Provides the starchy structure that sets the cake's crumb.
Eggs
Trap air when beaten and set the batter into a light, firm cake.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps give it a tender, fine texture.

The step that matters

Beat the mixture together for 20 minutes. Long beating whisks air into the egg-and-flour batter. That trapped air is what lifts the cake, so the batter should be beaten fully rather than just combined.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Blueberryfits about as well
  4. Orangethe original

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