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Dessert

A Nice Plain Cake

A plain cake made with flour, baking powder, dripping, sugar, eggs, milk, caraway seeds, and currants.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and caraway match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,435 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

A Nice Plain 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. In a bowl, combine flour and baking powder.

  2. Rub in the dripping until well mixed.

  3. Add sugar, caraway seeds, and currants.

  4. Whisk eggs with milk and mix everything thoroughly.

Bake

  1. Butter a cake tin and pour in the batter.

  2. Bake at 350°F (175°C) for 1 to 2 hours.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + curranttop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,475 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Flour
Forms the main structure of the cake as its starch sets during baking.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking so the cake rises and becomes light.
Dripping
Adds fat that coats flour particles, giving the cake a tender, rich crumb.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure, moisture and lift as they set.
Moist sugar
Adds sweetness and moisture, and helps the cake brown and stay soft.

The step that matters

Bake at 350°F (175°C) for 1 to 2 hours. Baking powder starts releasing gas as soon as it is wet, so the batter should go into the oven promptly. The cake needs enough time for the eggs and flour to set through the centre, so check doneness before removing it.

Swap the currant

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

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

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