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Potato Fried Cakes

A fried cake made from mashed potatoes, sugar, milk, shortening, eggs, baking powder, salt, nutmeg, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Potato and nutmeg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,052 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Potato Fried Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Combine mashed potatoes, sugar, milk, shortening, eggs, baking powder, salt, and nutmeg in a bowl.

  2. Mix until well combined, then add flour gradually to form a soft dough.

Cook

  1. Shape the dough into cakes and fry in a hot skillet until golden brown on both sides.

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. Potato + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,052 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Potato + milktop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

Mashed potatoes
Provides moisture and bulk, giving the cakes a tender interior.
Eggs
Bind the dough and add structure as they set during cooking.
Baking powder
Releases gas that lifts the dough, making the cakes lighter.
Shortening
Adds fat for tenderness and helps the cakes brown in the skillet.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the exterior brown in the skillet.

The step that matters

Frying the cakes in a hot skillet until golden brown on both sides. The cakes need enough heat to brown the outside before the interior dries out. Browning comes from the Maillard reaction and caramelization of the sugars, which need high heat. Too low a heat leaves them pale, greasy, or underdone in the middle.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Sweet potatofits better
  3. Parsnipfits better
  4. Potatothe original

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

More potato cakes recipes

Irish 4Mashed 4Sweet 4Fried 3Viennese 3 See all 131 →

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