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Dessert

White Loaf Cake

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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White Loaf Cake

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 ↓

White Loaf Cake

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the batter

  1. Cream the butter and sugar together in a large bowl.

  2. Add the milk and mix well.

  3. Sift the baking soda with the flour several times.

  4. In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites until frothy, then add the cream of tartar and continue beating until very stiff.

  5. Gently fold the egg whites into the butter mixture.

  6. Add the sifted flour mixture and flavoring, folding gently until combined.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into a greased loaf pan.

  2. Bake in a preheated oven at 300°F (150°C) for 1.5 hours, gradually increasing the heat.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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

Egg whites
Whipped to foam, they trap air that lifts the cake and gives it a light, airy crumb.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake together as it sets in the oven.
Butter
Adds fat that gives the cake richness and a tender texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps it brown while adding tenderness to the crumb.
Baking soda
Reacts to lift and leaven the batter as it bakes.
Cream of tartar
Stabilises the whipped egg whites so they hold their stiff foam.

The step that matters

Folding the egg whites into the butter mixture. Whipped egg whites are full of trapped air. Folding gently keeps that air in the batter; stirring vigorously would deflate the foam and leave the cake dense.

“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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