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Dessert

English Pound Cake

A dense cake made with equal parts butter, flour, sugar, eggs, currants, candied peel, citron, almonds, and optional mace.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and almond are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,673 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

English Pound Cake

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Cream the butter in a large bowl until smooth.

  2. Add the sugar and mix well.

  3. Prepare a round cake tin by lining it with buttered paper.

Make the batter

  1. Incorporate the beaten egg yolks, then add the flour, currants, candied peel, and almonds.

  2. Mix all ingredients thoroughly.

  3. Whisk the egg whites until stiff and fold them into the mixture.

  4. Beat the batter for 20 minutes.

  5. Pour the batter into the prepared tin.

Bake

  1. Bake in a preheated oven at 400°F (200°C) for 2 to 2.5 hours.

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 + almondtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + almondtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,245 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Currant + macetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,791 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  5. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

Eggs
Egg yolks enrich and bind the batter, while whipped whites add lift and a light crumb.
All-purpose flour
Flour provides the structure that sets the cake as its proteins and starches cook.
Unsalted butter
Butter adds richness, tenderness and flavor to the crumb.
Granulated sugar
Sugar sweetens the cake and helps create a tender crumb and browned crust.

The step that matters

Beating the whites and folding them in. Egg whites must be whipped until stiff so they trap air, and folding gently preserves that air. Overmixing or deflating the batter leads to a dense cake.

Swap the mace

The recipe marks mace as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, sugar, currant, egg, almond):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Allspicefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, sugar, currant, egg, almond. 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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