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Dessert

Old Fashioned Mixture for Mehitable Cake

A cake made with flour, butter, sugar, eggs, soda, cream of tartar, milk, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
By Jacqueline Harrison Smith (ed.) · From a historical cookbook (Project Gutenberg) · 11 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 81,283 recipes mention both. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Old Fashioned Mixture for Mehitable Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Rub together 1 qt. of sifted flour, a bit of butter the size of a small egg, 1 tablespoon of white sugar, 1 small spoonful of salt, and 2 teaspoons of cream of tartar.

  2. Dissolve 1 teaspoon of soda in a pint of milk.

Mix and bake

  1. Break 2 eggs into the flour and add the milk and soda. Stir quickly and deftly.

  2. Pour into square pans.

  3. Bake in a quick oven.

By Jacqueline Harrison Smith (ed.). Recipe from a historical cookbook (Project Gutenberg).

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. See the original page.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together43,450 recipes

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

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Aroma overlaplow
    Mentioned together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Aroma overlaplow
    Mentioned together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour share little aroma chemistry, yet 124,287 recipes mention both: they likely 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
Provides the structure that holds the cake together as it bakes.
Cream of tartar
Acidifies the batter so it reacts with soda to lift the cake.
Soda
Reacts with the acid in the batter to produce gas that makes the cake rise.
Eggs
Add structure and help bind the batter while adding richness.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and richness in the crumb.

The step that matters

Stir quickly and deftly. Once the soda and acid meet in the liquid batter, the gas they release starts escaping. Stirring briefly and gently keeps the air in, and overmixing toughens the gluten in the flour, giving a dense, tough cake.

“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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