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Dessert

Lady Baltimore Cake

A layered sponge cake with a sweet raisin, pecan, and fig filling, finished with a sugar syrup glaze.

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

Lady Baltimore Cake

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the cake batter

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Cream the butter and gradually add the sugar, beating continuously.

  3. Mix in the milk and rose water.

  4. Sift the baking powder into the flour and add it to the mixture.

  5. Fold in the stiffly beaten egg whites gently.

  6. Divide the batter into three layer pans and bake until golden.

Make the filling and assemble

  1. Dissolve 3 cups of sugar in 1 cup of boiling water for the filling.

  2. Cook the mixture until it can form a thread.

  3. Pour the syrup over the stiffly beaten whites of 3 eggs, stirring constantly.

  4. Add the chopped raisins, pecans, and figs to the icing.

  5. Ice the top and sides of the cake, and between the layers.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  3. Butter + pecanstop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,416 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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
Creams with sugar to trap air and give the cake a tender, rich crumb.
Egg whites
Whipped to foam, they add structure and lift to the batter and set the filling.
Flour
Forms the structure of the cake as the batter sets in the oven.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, helping the layers rise.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and, cooked into syrup, forms the filling's sticky, soft texture.
Raisins
Add chewy sweetness and moisture to the filling.

The step that matters

Cooking the sugar syrup to a thread stage. Sugar syrup must reach the right concentration before it is poured onto the egg whites. Undercooked syrup stays runny and will not set the icing, while overcooked syrup turns hard and grainy as it cools.

Swap the pecans

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Pistachiofits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Pecansthe original

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