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Dessert

Chess Cakes

A coconut cake made with coconut, sugar, water, butter, egg yolks, baked in pastry-lined patty pans.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Coconut and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,467 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Chess Cakes

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. Boil sugar in water for 15 minutes.

  2. Stir in grated coconut and boil for another 15 minutes.

  3. While warm, mix in butter and beaten egg yolks.

Bake

  1. Fill patty pans with rich pastry and pour in the mixture.

  2. Bake until golden.

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. Coconut + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  5. Coconut + sugartop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,742 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Coconut
Provides the main flavour and chewy, moist texture of the filling.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and, boiled with water, forms a syrup that binds the coconut.
Egg yolks
Thicken the warm filling and add richness and a set structure when baked.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smooth, tender mouthfeel to the filling.

The step that matters

Mixing in the egg yolks while the filling is warm. If the mixture is too hot, the egg yolks can scramble instead of blending smoothly. Mixing while it is warm, not boiling, lets the yolks combine evenly and thicken gently during baking.

Swap the coconut

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Lemonfits better
  3. Raisinfits about as well
  4. Coconutthe original

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