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Dessert

Lemon Cake

A layered cake made with butter, flour, sugar, eggs, milk, and a lemon filling of egg, lemon juice, peel, sugar, flour, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Lemon 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 ↓

Lemon Cake

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a hot oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Make the cake

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

  2. In a bowl, cream together the butter and 1½ cups sugar until light and fluffy.

  3. Add the eggs one at a time, mixing well after each addition.

  4. In another bowl, combine the flour and baking powder.

  5. Gradually add the flour mixture and milk to the butter mixture, alternating between the two.

  6. Pour the batter into three greased cake pans and bake until a toothpick comes out clean.

Make the filling

  1. For the filling, mix 1 egg, lemon juice, grated peel, 1 cup sugar, 1 tablespoon flour, and 1 teaspoon cold water in a saucepan.

  2. Cook over low heat until thick, then cool.

Assemble

  1. Spread the filling between the layers of 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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, 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

Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure and richness to the cake crumb.
Butter
Adds fat and tenderness, and creaming it with sugar traps air for a light crumb.
Flour
Provides the main structure of the cake as it sets during baking.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps it brown while tenderizing the crumb.
Milk
Adds moisture and liquid that hydrates the flour to form the batter.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the cake rises and becomes light.

The step that matters

Cooking the filling until thick. The flour and egg in the filling thicken as they heat and set, so it must be cooked long enough to thicken fully. Undercooked, it stays runny and can soak into the layers; cooling then lets it firm up.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

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