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Dessert

Nut Cake

A layered cake made with butter, sugar, flour, egg whites, raisins, walnuts, and a sugar‑egg white icing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Nut Cake

Why it works: Flour and raisin match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Nut 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 milk, flour, and Royal Baking Powder, mixing until smooth.

  4. Beat the egg whites until very light and fold them into the batter.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into jelly pans and bake until golden.

Make the icing and assemble

  1. For the icing, boil 3 cups of sugar with ⅓ cup of water until it hardens in water.

  2. Beat 2 egg whites until light and pour the syrup over them, beating continuously.

  3. Add 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract, 1 cup of stoned raisins, and 1 cup of chopped English walnuts.

  4. Spread the icing between the layers and on top of the cake.

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. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Almond + walnuttop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together993 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Almond + raisintop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,781 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  4. Flour + almondtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Egg whites
Whipped whites trap air in the batter, giving the cake lift and a light crumb.
Butter
Creaming with sugar traps air and adds richness and a tender texture.
Flour
Provides the starch and gluten structure that holds the cake together as it bakes.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps create a tender crumb when creamed with butter.
Royal baking powder
Releases gas during baking, helping the cake rise.
Milk
Adds moisture and loosens the batter so it bakes evenly.

The step that matters

Boiling the icing syrup. The sugar syrup must reach the right concentration before it is poured onto the whites. Too little boiling leaves the icing soft and runny, while too much makes it hard and brittle. Pouring it in while beating keeps it smooth and prevents it from setting in lumps.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Pistachiofits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Brazil nutfits about as well
  4. Walnutthe original

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