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Dessert

Phoebe's Poverty Cakes

A fried dough cake made with sour milk, baking soda, salt, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Phoebe's Poverty Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. In a bowl, combine sour milk, baking soda, and salt.

  2. Add flour gradually until a dough forms that can be rolled out.

Shape and fry

  1. Roll out the dough and cut it into narrow strips.

  2. Fry the strips in hot oil until golden brown.

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. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Sour milk
Its acidity reacts with the baking soda to produce gas, giving the dough lift.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in sour milk to leaven the dough and help it puff when fried.
Flour
Provides the starch and gluten structure that holds the dough together for rolling and frying.

The step that matters

Frying the strips in hot oil. If the oil is not hot enough, the strips absorb excess oil and turn greasy and heavy. Hot oil sets the outside quickly, seals in moisture, and drives the puffing and browning.

“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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