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Dessert

Old Hartford Election Cake

A sweet yeast cake with butter, sugar, raisins, nutmeg, and lemon, baked after rising.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Old Hartford Election Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Rub the butter into the flour until fine.

  2. Add 1 lb of sugar, then the yeast.

  3. Stir in ½ quart of hot milk in winter or blood-warm milk in summer.

  4. Add the beaten eggs and lemon juice, then the remaining milk.

  5. Beat well and let it rise overnight.

Rise and bake

  1. In the morning, beat it again, adding the remaining sugar, raisins, and nutmeg.

  2. Let it rise for 3 to 4 hours, then pour into pans and bake.

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

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

  3. Nutmeg + raisintop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-terpineol (lilac, floral).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Provides the structure that holds the dough and its rise together.
Butter
Adds fat that tenderises the crumb and enriches the flavour.
Sugar
Sweetens the dough and feeds the yeast during rising.
Yeast
Produces gas that makes the dough rise and become light.
Eggs
Add richness and help set the structure as the cake bakes.
Raisins
Add sweetness, moisture and chewy pockets throughout the cake.

The step that matters

Adding the milk at the right temperature. Yeast is sensitive to heat. Milk that is too hot can kill it, and milk that is too cool slows the rise, so the milk should be hot in winter and only blood-warm in summer as the record directs.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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

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