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Dessert

Seed Cake

A sweet loaf cake flavored with caraway seeds and nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Caraway and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 200 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Seed 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.

Prepare

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

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, beat together the sugar, butter, and eggs until smooth.

  2. Add the milk and mix well.

  3. Sift the flour with the baking powder and stir into the mixture.

  4. Fold in the caraway seeds and season with nutmeg.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into a loaf pan or patty tins.

  2. Bake until golden brown.

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. Caraway + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together200 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Flour + carawaytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,435 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  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

Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure as they set during baking.
Butter
Adds richness and tenderness to the crumb.
Flour
Forms the structure of the cake as it sets in the oven.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the cake rises.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps it brown during baking.

The step that matters

Beat the sugar, butter, and eggs until smooth. Creaming fat with sugar traps air that helps leaven the batter. Under-beaten batter gives a denser cake, while the eggs must be well blended so the batter stays even.

Swap the caraway

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Carawaythe original
  3. Allspicefits about as well
  4. Clovefits about as well

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