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Dessert

Fleed or Flead Cakes

A simple milk and butter cake made from flour, milk, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Fleed or Flead Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the dough

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. In a bowl, mix the flour and butter until crumbly.

  3. Add the milk gradually, mixing until a dough forms.

Shape and bake

  1. Roll out the dough to more than half an inch thick.

  2. Cut the dough into small rounds using a cutter.

  3. Place the rounds on a baking sheet and bake for 10 to 15 minutes until pale and risen.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

All-purpose flour
Provides the main structure as its proteins form gluten when moistened and mixed.
Butter
Coats flour particles to limit gluten and adds richness and a tender crumb.
Milk
Hydrates the flour to form the dough and adds moisture and browning from its milk sugars.

The step that matters

Add the milk gradually, mixing until a dough forms. Adding milk a little at a time lets you stop once the dough just holds together. Too much liquid makes it sticky, and overmixing develops gluten, which toughens the cakes.

“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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