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Dessert

To Make a Cake Without Butter

A butterless cake made with eggs, sugar, almonds, orange flower water, lemon, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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To Make a Cake Without Butter

Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

To Make a Cake Without Butter

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. Beat the eggs for 30 minutes.

  2. Gradually add the sugar and beat for another 30 minutes.

  3. Mix in the pounded almonds, orange flower water, lemon rind, and lemon juice.

  4. Continue beating until the oven is ready.

Bake

  1. Just before baking, fold in the warm flour.

  2. Grease a cake pan with butter and pour in the batter.

  3. Bake for 1.5 hours at 350°F (175°C).

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Almond + flourtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Almond + orangetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,125 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Almond + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Almond + buttertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,245 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Beaten long to trap air, giving the cake its light, airy structure.
Fine loaf sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps stabilise the beaten eggs as they are whipped.
Sweet almonds
Add richness and a moist, tender crumb to the batter.
Fine flour
Sets during baking to form the cake's final structure.
Lemon
Its rind adds aroma and its juice adds brightness to the batter.

The step that matters

Fold in the warm flour gently just before baking. Folding keeps the air beaten into the eggs; overmixing or a long wait after adding flour deflates the batter and yields a denser cake.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Orangethe original

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