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Dessert

Minnehaha Cake

A layered cake with a sugar and egg white filling, containing raisins or hickory nuts.

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. In a bowl, cream together the sugar and butter until light and fluffy.

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

  4. In another bowl, combine the cream of tartar, flour, baking soda, and milk, and mix until smooth.

Bake

  1. Drop the two batters alternately into a papered cake tin.

  2. Bake in 3 layers until golden brown.

Make the filling

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

  2. Remove the sugar mixture from heat and stir it quickly into the well-beaten egg white.

  3. Add the chopped raisins or hickory nuts and mix the filling well.

Assemble

  1. Spread the filling between the layers of the cake.

  2. Spread the filling on top of the cake.

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

Egg whites
Provide structure and lift, and the whipped whites give the filling its airy body.
Butter
Adds fat that tenderizes the crumb and carries flavor.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps create a tender, browned crumb.
Flour
Forms the structure that holds the cake's crumb together as it bakes.
Cream of tartar
Acidifies the batter and stabilizes the beaten egg whites.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the batter to produce gas that makes the cake rise.

The step that matters

Stirring the hot sugar into the egg whites. The hot syrup cooks and sets the beaten whites into a stable, spreadable filling. If the syrup is cool or added slowly, the whites can deflate or stay runny.

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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