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Dessert

Rout Drop-cakes

A sweet drop cake made with flour, butter, sugar, currants, eggs, orange‑flower water, rose water, sweet wine, and brandy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and rose work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 876 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Rout Drop-cakes

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

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

Make the dough

  1. In a large bowl, mix the flour, butter, sugar, and currants.

  2. Add the eggs, orange-flower water, rose water, sweet wine, and brandy to the mixture. Stir until you form a stiff paste.

Bake

  1. Drop spoonfuls of the mixture onto a floured baking sheet.

  2. Bake for a very short time until golden.

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 + rosetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together876 recipes

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

  2. Currant + rosetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together494 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,645 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  5. Currant + winetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,323 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

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

Flour
Provides the main structure that holds the stiff paste together as the cakes bake.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and richness, and helps the cakes brown.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and contributes to golden browning in the oven.
Currants
Add fruit flavour and small pockets of chewy sweetness throughout the cakes.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and add moisture and structure as they set in the oven.

The step that matters

Bake for a very short time until golden. The cakes are small and dough-like, so they can dry out or over-darken quickly. Watching for golden colour rather than running the clock helps keep them moist and evenly browned.

Swap the orange

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, butter, sugar, currant, egg, rose, wine):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Raspberryfits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, sugar, currant, egg, rose, wine. 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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