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Dessert

Neapolitan Cake

A layered cake made with brown sugar, molasses, coffee, raisins, currants, and spices, baked in alternating black and white batters.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 19 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 ↓

Neapolitan 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 dark batter

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

  2. In a bowl, mix together brown sugar, eggs, butter, molasses, and strong coffee. Add flour, raisins, currants, baking soda, cinnamon, cloves, and mace. Mix well.

Make the light batter

  1. In another bowl, cream together sugar and butter. Add milk, flour, corn-starch, egg whites, and cream of tartar. Mix until smooth.

Bake and cool

  1. Grease round jelly pans and pour in the black and white batter alternately. Bake until the cakes are ½ inch thick and a toothpick comes out clean. Let the cakes cool before removing from pans.

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 + curranttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,180 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, creamy).

  3. Sugar + molassestop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,225 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Molasses + raisintop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,577 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure as the cake sets in the oven.
Egg whites
Whipped-free whites add lightness and help the pale batter rise and set.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and richness in both batters.
Molasses
Adds moisture, deep sweetness and color to the dark batter.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic molasses and coffee to help the dark batter rise.
Cream of tartar
Acidifies the light batter, stabilizing the egg whites and helping them rise.

The step that matters

Alternating the two batters. Pouring the dark and light batters alternately in the pans keeps the two colors distinct. Mixing them together instead would blend the layers and turn the cake one uniform shade.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Applefits about as well
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, egg, butter, molasses, coffee, flour, raisin. 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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