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Dessert

Guisachan Gingerbread

A Scottish gingerbread cake made with butter, treacle, spices, oatmeal, flour, and ale, baked at 300°F.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Allspice and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,536 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Guisachan Gingerbread

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.

Make the dough

  1. Cream the butter in a large bowl.

  2. Add the syrup, sugar, and beaten eggs; mix well.

  3. Stir in the ground ginger, allspice, caraway seeds, cinnamon, lemon peel, nutmeg, and baking soda dissolved in ale.

  4. Mix in the oatmeal and enough flour to form a dough.

Prepare the dish

  1. Line a baking dish with thick paper and butter a sheet of white paper to place next to the cake.

Bake

  1. Pour the mixture into the prepared dish and bake at 300°F (150°C) for about two hours.

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. Allspice + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Ginger + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,380 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Ginger + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,620 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Caraway + cinnamontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together188 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Syrup + sugartop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Creams with the sugar and syrup to give the cake richness and a tender crumb.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and add structure as they set in the oven.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidity of the syrup and ale to lighten the cake as it bakes.
Flour
Forms the dough and provides the structure that holds the cake together.
Syrup (treacle)
Adds sweetness, dark colour, and moisture, and helps the cake brown.

Swap the caraway

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, syrup, sugar, egg, ginger, allspice, cinnamon):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Clovefits better
  3. Cardamomfits better
  4. Carawaythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, syrup, sugar, egg, ginger, allspice, cinnamon. 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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