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Dessert

Yorkshire Tea Cakes

Yorkshire tea cakes are small cakes made with flour, milk, lard, egg, sugar, and yeast, baked after rising.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Yorkshire Tea Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the yeast

  1. Cream the sugar and yeast together.

  2. Melt the lard in a saucepan, then pour the milk over it and make it lukewarm.

  3. Pour the lukewarm mixture onto the yeast and sugar.

Make the dough

  1. Strain the yeast and milk mixture into the flour, add the beaten egg, and mix well.

  2. Flour a board, turn the dough onto it, beat it, and cut it into cakes.

Rise and bake

  1. Grease the rings and place the cakes inside, then let them rise for one hour.

  2. Bake the cakes for 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 + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

  5. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Coombs' flour
Forms the dough's structure once wet and gives the cakes their body.
German yeast
Produces gas as it ferments, making the dough rise and become light.
Egg
Adds richness and helps bind the dough, giving a softer crumb.
Lard
Adds fat that tenderizes the crumb and gives a richer texture.
Milk
Adds moisture and milk proteins that help browning and softness.

The step that matters

Make the milk mixture lukewarm. Yeast is killed by heat, so the liquid must be only lukewarm before it meets the yeast. Too hot and the dough will not rise properly.

“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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