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Dessert

To Make Queen-Cakes

A sweet cake made with sugar, flour, butter, eggs, currants, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

To Make Queen-Cakes

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Beat and sift the sugar.

  2. Cream the butter until smooth.

  3. Add the sugar to the butter and mix well.

Make the batter

  1. Beat the egg whites for about 30 minutes, then mix with the butter and sugar.

  2. Beat the egg yolks for about 30 minutes, then add to the mixture.

  3. Mix in the flour, spices, and currants until well combined.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into tins and dust a little sugar on top.

  2. Bake in the oven until golden.

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. Nutmeg + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Nutmeg + macetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Mace + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Whipped whites and yolks add air and structure, helping the cakes rise and set.
Butter
Creamed with sugar, it traps air and gives the cakes richness and a tender crumb.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the cakes together as they set in the oven.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the cakes and, creamed with butter, helps trap air for lightness.
Currants
Add small pockets of fruit sweetness and chewy texture throughout the cake.

The step that matters

Beating the egg whites and yolks. Whites and yolks must be beaten long enough to hold air. Under-beaten eggs give a dense cake, while the air they hold lifts the batter as it bakes.

Swap the currant

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

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

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