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Dessert

Minnehaha Cake

A layered cake with a sweet raisin filling made from sugar, water, and beaten egg white.

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 ↓

Minnehaha 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 batter

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

  2. Cream together the granulated sugar and butter until smooth.

  3. Add the egg whites (or whole eggs) and mix well.

  4. In a separate bowl, combine the cream of tartar, flour, and baking soda.

  5. Gradually add the dry ingredients to the butter mixture, alternating with the sweet milk.

  6. Divide the batter into three layers and bake until golden.

Make the filling and assemble

  1. For the filling, boil 1 cup of sugar with a little water until it reaches a brittle stage in cold water.

  2. Remove from heat and quickly stir into the beaten egg white.

  3. Fold in the chopped raisins or hickory nuts and spread between the layers.

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

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

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

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

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

Butter
Creams with the sugar to give the cake a tender, soft crumb.
Egg whites
Add structure and lift to the batter, and form the base of the filling.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake layers together.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the cream of tartar to make the cake rise.
Cream of tartar
Acidifies the batter so baking soda can react and help the cake rise.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and, boiled to a brittle stage, sets the filling.

The step that matters

Stirring the boiled sugar into the egg white. The sugar syrup must be hot but removed from heat at the right stage, then added quickly. If it cools too much it sets unevenly, and if it is stirred in slowly the hot syrup can cook the egg white unevenly, giving a grainy or lumpy filling.

Swap the raisin

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinthe original
  3. Coconutfits less well
  4. Figfits less well

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