Name: Sponge Cake Pudding
Ingredients: sponge cake batter; 2 egg whites; ½ cup loaf sugar

Why it works: Egg and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 122,807 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Sponge Cake Pudding

Ingredients

sponge cake batter
2 egg whites
½ cup loaf sugar

Directions

Make the batter

Prepare a sponge cake batter.
Shape the batter into a pyramid and boil it.

Add the egg white sauce

Beat the egg whites and loaf sugar together until well combined.
Pour the egg white sauce over the boiled pyramid.

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.

Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together122,807 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Sponge cake batter: Forms the cake base of the pudding that the sauce is poured over.
Egg whites: Beaten to form a light foam that gives the sauce its airy texture.
Loaf sugar: Sweetens the egg white mixture and helps stabilize the beaten foam.

“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.