Skip to main content
Dessert

Excellent Breakfast Caeies

A simple dough of flour, baking powder, lard, salt, and milk baked or fried into cakes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Flour and walnut are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,873 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Excellent Breakfast Caeies

Oven, in the book's wordsA warm oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Mix the baking powder with the flour in a bowl.

  2. Add the lard and salt, then mix lightly.

  3. Gradually add cold milk until the mixture is moistened.

Shape and cook

  1. Roll out the dough to ½ inch thickness.

  2. Cut into cakes using the top of a dredging box.

  3. Cook immediately on a hot griddle or in a warm oven.

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 + walnuttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Walnut + milktop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,236 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

Flour and milk 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

All-purpose flour
Provides the main structure that holds the cakes together as they cook.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the dough so the cakes rise and become light.
Lard
Adds fat that tenderizes the dough and keeps the cakes from turning tough.
Cold milk
Moistens the flour so the mixture binds into a dough.

The step that matters

Cook immediately after cutting. Baking powder starts releasing gas as soon as it meets liquid, so waiting before cooking lets the rising power fade and the cakes come out denser.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Milletfits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, 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.

More breakfast cakes recipes

Cornmeal 18Corn 13Graham 13Newport 10Rye 6English 5 See all 81 →

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes