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Bacon Cake

A baked dish of bacon pieces covered in pastry-like paste, topped with egg and baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Pepper and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 33% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 50,580 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Bacon 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.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Line a plate with common paste.

  3. Evenly distribute the bacon pieces over the paste.

  4. Dust a little pepper over the bacon.

  5. Cover with more paste, pinch the edges to seal.

  6. Brush the top with beaten egg.

Bake

  1. Bake in the preheated oven until golden brown.

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. Pepper + eggtop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together50,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Pepper and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 50,580 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

Common paste
Forms the pastry layers that enclose the filling and bake into a crisp casing.
Bacon
Provides the savoury filling and fat that flavours the cake as it cooks.
Egg
Beaten egg brushed on top promotes browning and a glossy golden finish.

“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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