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Dessert

Punched Calces

A sweet cake made with sugar, butter, flour, spices, citron, almonds, and boiling milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and almond are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,673 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Punched Calces

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Rub the sugar and butter together until creamy.

  2. Mix in the flour and spices or minced citron and almonds.

  3. Add enough boiling milk to form a dough.

Shape and bake

  1. Work the dough well and roll it thin.

  2. Cut into cakes, punch them, and bake on oven leaves in a slow 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. Flour + almondtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Anise + almondtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together55 recipes

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

  3. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  4. Flour + anisetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together270 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + almondtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,245 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

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 cakes together as they bake.
Butter
Adds fat that makes the cakes rich and tender in texture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and, when creamed with butter, helps give a tender crumb.
Boiling milk
Adds moisture and partly cooks the flour starch, helping the dough come together.

The step that matters

Add enough boiling milk to form a dough. Boiling milk partly sets the starch in the flour, so the amount matters: too little leaves a crumbly dough, and too much makes it sticky and hard to roll thin.

Swap the anise

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, butter, flour, almond, milk):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Anisethe original
  4. Capersfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, flour, almond, milk. 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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