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Dessert

Rice Cake

A sweet cake made with rice flour, currants, candied peel, butter, sugar, eggs, and baking powder.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Rice Cake

Why it works: Butter and milk 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 ↓

Rice Cake

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

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

  2. Rub the butter into the flour.

Make the batter

  1. Add the salt, baking powder, ground rice, sugar, currants, and candied peel; mix well.

  2. Stir in the beaten eggs and enough milk to make a stiff paste.

Bake and cool

  1. Divide the mixture into two small tins lined with buttered paper.

  2. Bake for a little over an hour, or until a skewer comes out clean.

  3. Once baked, turn the cakes out onto their sides or a sieve to cool.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Rice + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Butter + flourtop 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).

Butter and flour 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

Butter
Rubbed into the flour, it coats flour particles and gives the cake a tender, rich crumb.
Flour
Forms the main structure of the cake once it is bound with eggs and milk.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking, helping the cakes rise and become lighter.
Ground rice
Adds a fine, slightly crumbly texture and helps the cake stay short and tender.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and add structure and richness as they set in the oven.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and contributes to browning on the crust during baking.

The step that matters

Baking until a skewer comes out clean. The cakes are dense and thick, so the centre can stay wet if underbaked. Testing with a skewer confirms the eggs and starches have set throughout, while overbaking dries the crumb.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, rice, sugar, egg, milk):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Currantthe original

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