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Dessert

Yorkshire Tea-cakes

Yorkshire tea cakes are small yeast‑leavened cakes made with flour, milk, egg, fat, yeast, sugar, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Yorkshire Tea-cakes

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 ↓

Yorkshire Tea-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.

Prepare the yeast mixture

  1. Cream the sugar and yeast together.

  2. Melt the fat in a saucepan, then pour in the milk and heat until lukewarm.

  3. Pour the lukewarm milk mixture over the yeast and sugar.

Make and shape the dough

  1. Strain the yeast and milk mixture into the flour, add the beaten egg, and mix well.

  2. Flour a board, turn the dough onto it, and knead gently.

  3. Cut the dough into cakes and place them in greased cake tins.

Rise and bake

  1. Let the cakes rise by the fire for 1 hour.

  2. Bake in a preheated oven at 400°F (200°C) for 15 minutes.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 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 structure that the dough gains from gluten as it is mixed and kneaded.
Egg
Adds richness and helps bind the dough together.
Milk
Adds moisture to the dough and softens its texture.
Active dry yeast
Ferments the dough so the cakes rise and become light.
Fat (butter or lard)
Adds tenderness and richness to the crumb.

The step that matters

Heating the milk to lukewarm. Yeast is killed by high heat, so the milk should be only lukewarm before it meets the yeast; if it is too hot the cakes will fail to rise.

“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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