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Dessert

Brown Cake

A baked cake made with eggs, flour, sugar, almonds, cinnamon, cloves, and flavoring.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Brown Cake

Why it works: Cinnamon and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Brown 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

  1. Preheat the oven to 300°F (150°C).

  2. Beat the eggs separately.

Make the batter

  1. Cream the sugar and egg yolks together.

  2. Add the flour, cinnamon, flavoring, rolled almonds, and cloves to the mixture.

  3. Fold in the beaten egg whites gently.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into a prepared baking pan and bake slowly.

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. Cinnamon + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Cinnamon + almondtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,514 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Cinnamon + sugartop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Cinnamon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Eggs
Egg whites, beaten and folded in, give the cake its light, airy structure.
Flour
Provides the starch and gluten network that sets the cake's structure as it bakes.
Sugar
Creamed with the yolks for sweetness and to help trap air, adding tenderness to the crumb.
Rolled almonds
Add texture and a nutty flavor to the batter.

The step that matters

Fold in the beaten egg whites gently. Deflating the whipped egg whites removes the air that makes the cake rise and turns it dense. Gentle folding keeps the foam intact until it sets in the oven.

Swap the clove

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Turmericfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, flour, cinnamon, sugar, almond. 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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