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Beef Cakes

Beef cakes made with mashed potatoes, minced beef, egg, butter, breadcrumbs, and fried.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Beef Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the potatoes

  1. Peel and boil the potatoes until tender. Pass them through a wire sieve into a bowl.

Shape the cakes

  1. Add the minced beef, pepper, salt, half of the beaten egg, and melted butter to the potatoes. Mix thoroughly.

  2. Form the mixture into round cakes about ½ inch thick.

  3. Brush the tops with the remaining egg and roll in bread crumbs.

Fry and serve

  1. Heat oil in a frying pan until smoking hot. Fry the cakes until golden brown.

  2. Drain on paper towels and serve in a ring on a plate with parsley in the center.

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. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Potato + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,855 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  4. Potato + beeftop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,052 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

  5. Potato + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,305 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Potatoes
Form the bulk of the cake and give it a soft, moist interior.
Minced beef
Provides the savory meat flavor and filling of each cake.
Egg
Binds the mixture together and helps the coated tops set and brown.
Butter
Adds richness and flavor and helps keep the cakes moist.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp, golden crust on the outside when fried.

The step that matters

Frying until smoking hot. Oil that is hot enough sears the bread crumb coating quickly, so it turns crisp and golden instead of absorbing oil and becoming greasy. Cakes fried in cooler oil tend to fall apart and soak up fat.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, pepper, egg, butter, bread, parsley):

  1. Potatothe original
  2. Chivefits about as well
  3. Capsicumfits about as well
  4. Carrotfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, pepper, egg, butter, bread, parsley. 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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