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Dessert

Pineapple, or Orange Cake

A moist cake made with butter, sugar, eggs, flour, milk, baking soda, and either pineapple or orange, topped with fruit icing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Pineapple, or Orange 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. Cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy.

  3. Add the beaten eggs and mix well.

  4. In a separate bowl, combine the flour, cream of tartar, and baking soda.

  5. Gradually add the dry ingredients to the butter mixture, alternating with the sweet milk.

Bake and finish

  1. Pour the batter into jelly-cake tins, filling them four or five deep.

  2. Bake until a toothpick inserted comes out clean.

  3. Prepare a thick icing flavored with the fruit juice and a little tartaric acid.

  4. Spread the icing thickly on the cakes, then top with grated pineapple or orange.

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

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

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + pineappletop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together885 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

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
Beaten eggs add structure and richness, helping the cake set and hold its crumb.
Butter
Creaming butter with sugar traps air that lightens the crumb and adds richness.
Sugar
Sugar sweetens the cake and, creamed with butter, helps create a tender texture.
Flour
Flour forms the cake's main structure once mixed with liquid and heated.
Baking soda
Baking soda reacts with the acidic cream of tartar to produce gas that makes the cake rise.
Cream of tartar
Cream of tartar is an acid that reacts with baking soda to leaven the batter.

The step that matters

Gradually adding the dry ingredients. Adding flour mixture in alternating portions with the milk keeps the batter smooth and emulsified. Dumping it in at once can overwork the batter or leave lumps, affecting an even, tender crumb.

Swap the pineapple

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Pineapplethe original

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