Skip to main content
Main

Yorkshire Cakes

A yeast‑leavened cake made with flour, egg, milk, and optional sugar and caraway seeds, baked in greased tins.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Flour and caraway match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,435 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Yorkshire Cakes

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. Dry the flour before the fire.

  2. Beat the egg with the yeast and add the lukewarm milk.

  3. Strain the mixture into the flour and mix lightly into a dough.

  4. Let the dough rise by the fire for 1 hour.

Shape and bake

  1. Shape the dough into cakes.

  2. Grease the tins with a little butter and warm them.

  3. Place the cakes on the warm tins, cover with a cloth, and let them rise for 20-30 minutes.

  4. Bake in a brisk 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 + carawaytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,435 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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
Forms the dough structure that holds the cakes together and gives them body.
Egg
Adds richness and helps bind the dough while setting during baking.
Yeast
Produces gas as it ferments, making the dough rise and become light.
Milk
Provides moisture to hydrate the flour and activate the yeast.

The step that matters

Let the dough rise by the fire for 1 hour. Yeast needs warmth to ferment and produce the gas that lightens the dough. Too cold and the dough stays dense; too hot and the yeast can die or over-ferment, so the rise has to be steady and gentle.

Swap the caraway

The recipe marks caraway as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, egg, milk, butter, sugar):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Carawaythe original
  4. Jalapenofits about as well

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

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes