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Dessert

Water Cakes

A cake made from flour, sugar, butter, caraway seeds, and boiling milk, rolled thin and baked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Water Cakes

Oven, in the book's wordsA brisk oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. Dry the flour thoroughly.

  2. Rub in the sugar, butter, and caraway seeds.

  3. Make a paste with the boiling milk.

Shape and bake

  1. Roll the dough very thin and cut into desired shapes.

  2. Punch holes in the shapes and bake on tin plates in a cool 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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

Fine flour
Forms the main structure of the dough once it is mixed with liquid.
Butter
Rubbed into the flour to add fat, which tenderises the crumb and keeps it short.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the cake brown lightly and stay tender.
Caraway seeds
Adds a distinct aromatic flavour to the cake.
New milk
Moistens the flour and binds it into a workable paste.

The step that matters

Roll the dough very thin. Thin dough dries out and crisps as it bakes, while thick dough stays soft and dense in the centre. Even thickness also ensures the shapes bake through at the same rate.

“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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