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Baking

Fleed or Flead Cakes

Small round cakes made from flour, flead and butter, cut out with a round cutter and baked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Fleed or Flead Cakes

Oven, in the book's wordsA very slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a very slow oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare

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

  2. Cut the flead into small pieces.

Make and bake the cakes

  1. Mix the flour, flead, and butter until well combined.

  2. Shape the mixture into small cakes using a round cutter, leaving them more than half an inch thick.

  3. Bake the cakes for 10 to 15 minutes until they rise and are pale.

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

Flour
Provides the main structure that holds the cakes together as they bake.
Butter
Adds fat for a tender texture and helps the cakes brown lightly.

The step that matters

Shaping the cakes to more than half an inch thick. Thin cakes dry out and set before they can rise in the oven. Keeping them thicker gives the dough room to expand with the heat, producing a lighter, more tender crumb.

“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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