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Dessert

Indian Light Cake

A light cake made with Indian meal, milk, eggs, butter, baking soda, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter 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 ↓

Indian Light Cake

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Mix the butter and salt with the Indian meal.

  2. Boil half the milk.

  3. In a separate bowl, add the dissolved baking soda and beaten eggs to the remaining half of cold milk.

Make the batter

  1. Pour the boiling milk over the meal.

  2. Let it cool.

  3. Then add the cold milk mixture.

Bake

  1. Bake in a shallow pan.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Indian meal
Forms the bulk and structure of the cake as it sets.
Milk
Adds moisture and softens the meal so the batter becomes pourable.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add richness and set structure when baked.
Baking soda
Helps the batter rise and lighten in the oven.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and a richer flavour.

The step that matters

Let the cooked meal cool before adding the cold milk mixture. Adding eggs to very hot meal can scramble them and leave lumps. Cooling first keeps the eggs smooth and lets the batter mix evenly before baking.

“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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