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Raisin Cake

A sweet cake made with sugar, butter, milk, flour, baking powder, lemon flavoring, egg whites, raisins, and a boiled sugar water filling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and raisin match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Raisin Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, mix together the sugar and melted butter.

  2. Add the sweet milk, flour, baking powder, and lemon flavoring; mix well.

  3. Gently fold in the beaten egg whites.

  4. Pour the batter into layers and bake until golden.

Make the filling

  1. For the filling, combine a little water with the sugar in a saucepan and bring to a boil.

  2. Chop the raisins and beat the egg white.

  3. Remove the sugar mixture from heat and stir in the raisins and beaten egg white.

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 + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Egg whites
Beaten and folded into the batter to add lift and a light, airy crumb.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, giving the cake a tender texture and flavor.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake together as it bakes.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, helping the cake rise and become light.
Raisins
Add chewy texture and concentrated sweetness to the filling.

The step that matters

Folding in the beaten egg whites. Gentle folding keeps the air beaten into the egg whites inside the batter. Stirring vigorously deflates them, which leads to a denser, flatter cake.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Coconutfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, milk, flour, egg, raisin. 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 raisin cake recipes

Spiced 34Molasses 30Eggless 11Caraway 7Currant 7Filling 7 See all 154 →

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