Skip to main content
Dessert

Park Street Cake

A lemon-flavored cake with butter, sugar, flour, eggs, and a powdered sugar icing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Park Street 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.

Prepare the batter

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

  2. Beat the egg whites and yolks separately.

  3. Cream the butter and sugar together.

  4. Add the egg yolks, lemon juice and rind, nutmeg, milk, and egg whites to the mixture.

  5. Gradually mix in the flour, baking soda, and cream of tartar.

Bake and ice

  1. Pour the batter into jelly-cake pans.

  2. Bake until golden brown.

  3. For icing, mix powdered sugar with vanilla and spread between the layers of the cakes.

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. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

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

  3. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Whites trap air for lift and yolks add richness and structure to the crumb.
Flour
Forms the structure that holds the cake's shape as it bakes.
Butter
Creamed with sugar to trap air and add tenderness and flavor.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps brown it while tenderizing the crumb.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the batter to produce gas that helps the cake rise.
Cream of tartar
Acidifies the batter, stabilizing the egg whites and supporting the baking soda's rise.

The step that matters

Beat the egg whites and yolks separately. Whites beaten to a stable foam give the cake most of its lift. If they are deflated or yolk gets into the whites, the foam collapses and the cake turns out dense.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sugar, milk, flour, butter, cream, nutmeg. 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.

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesVanilla Ice CreamVanilla Ice Cream108 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipes