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Parisian Cake

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Parisian Cake

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

  1. Prepare the brioche dough and let it rise.

  2. On a marble slab, place the flour and form a well in the center.

  3. Add the salt, sugar, a little water, butter, and eggs into the well and mix thoroughly.

  4. Before adding the sponge, mix in the maraschino and whipped cream.

  5. Transfer the mixture into a buttered mold and let it rise in a cool place.

  6. Once it nearly reaches the top of the mold, wrap a band of paper around the edge.

  7. Bake in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C) until light in color.

  8. Serve hot; you can pour maraschino into a hole made in the center or layer with apricot marmalade.

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 + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  3. Apricot + angelicatop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together117 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + angelicatop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together104 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Swap the angelica

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, sugar, butter, egg, cream, apricot):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar, butter, egg, cream, apricot. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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