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Dessert

Superior Loaf Cake

A yeasted loaf cake with raisins, currants, citron, cinnamon, mace, and wine or brandy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 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 ↓

Superior Loaf Cake

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a moderate oven”. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare the dough

  1. Warm ½ cup of butter with the milk.

  2. Mix in 1 cup of flour and the yeast; let it rise.

  3. Beat the egg whites and yolks separately.

Mix and bake

  1. Add the remaining ingredients, including the wine or brandy, to the risen mixture.

  2. Pour the batter into well-buttered cake tins and let it rise again.

  3. Bake in a moderate oven at 350°F (175°C) for 2 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 + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Raisin + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

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

  4. Flour + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

Yeast
Ferments and lifts the dough so the risen mixture gets an airy crumb.
Eggs
Add structure and richness, with whipped whites giving lift to the batter.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and a rich, moist crumb.
Flour
Forms the gluten network that gives the cake its structure.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps browning in the baked crust.
Baking soda
Reacts to add lift and help the crumb rise in the oven.

The step that matters

Let the batter rise again before baking. The second rise in buttered tins lets the yeast build gas and air bubbles. Baking before the batter has risen enough can give a dense, heavy loaf.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Applefits better
  4. Currantthe original

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