Skip to main content
Dessert

Silver Cake

A sweet baked cake made with butter, lard, sugar, egg whites, milk, baking soda, flour, cream of tartar, and lemon flavoring.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Silver Cake

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the batter

  1. Cream together the butter and lard with the sugar until light and fluffy.

  2. Add the egg whites, milk, and baking soda; mix well.

  3. Sift the flour with the cream of tartar and gradually add to the mixture.

  4. Mix until just combined, then add lemon flavoring.

Bake

  1. Bake in a warmer than moderate oven (about 400°F or 200°C) until golden.

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 + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 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

Butter and lard
Provide fat that tenderizes the crumb and carries flavor.
Fine sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps hold air when creamed with fat.
Egg whites
Add structure and moisture, helping the cake set as it bakes.
All-purpose flour
Builds the main structure of the cake as its proteins set in baking.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the batter to lift and lighten the crumb.
Cream of tartar
Adds acidity that activates the baking soda and stabilizes the whipped whites.

The step that matters

Mix until just combined. Overmixing after the flour is added develops gluten, which can make the cake tough and dense. Stop once no dry flour streaks remain.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes