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Dessert

Maple-cakes

Maple Cakes are fried dough shapes made with butter, lard, flour, salt, and buttermilk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and buttermilk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,721 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Maple-cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Mix the butter and lard together.

  2. Add salt and flour, then mix with buttermilk until combined.

  3. Knead the dough on a floured surface until smooth.

Shape and fry

  1. Roll the dough very thin and cut into shapes like crullers.

  2. Fry the cut shapes in lard until golden brown.

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 + buttermilktop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,721 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + buttermilktop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,674 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Butter and flour 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

Butter and lard
Fat that makes the dough tender and adds richness and flavour.
Flour
Forms the gluten structure that gives the dough its body.
Buttermilk
Adds moisture to bind the flour and fat into a dough.

The step that matters

Roll the dough very thin. Thin dough cooks through quickly in hot fat, so it becomes crisp and evenly browned rather than doughy in the centre.

“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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