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Dessert

Raisin Cake

A sweet cake with raisins, lemon flavoring, and a sugared 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

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the cake

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

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

  3. Add the sweet milk, flour, baking powder, and lemon flavoring; stir until combined.

  4. Gently fold in the beaten egg whites.

  5. Pour the batter into prepared cake pans and bake until golden.

Make the filling

  1. For the filling, combine 1 cup of sugar with a little water 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
Whipped and folded in to lighten the batter and give the cake its airy structure.
Flour
Forms the main structure of the cake once it sets in the oven.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and a rich flavor in the crumb.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the cake rises and becomes light.
White sugar
Sweetens the batter and helps the cake brown as it bakes.

The step that matters

Fold in the beaten egg whites gently. Egg whites hold air only while they are beaten. Heavy stirring knocks that air out, so the cake bakes up flatter and denser.

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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