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Dessert

Soda Plum Cake

A cake made with flour, sugar, currants, candied peel, raisins, butter, milk, baking soda, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Soda Plum Cake

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Rub the butter into the flour.

  3. Add all dry ingredients except the baking soda.

  4. Clean the currants, stone the raisins, and finely chop the candied peel.

Make the dough

  1. Pour in half the milk and add the baking soda dissolved in 2 teaspoons of cold water.

  2. Mix well to form a rather stiff dough.

Bake

  1. Put the mixture in a greased cake tin and bake for about 2 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. 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. Currant + raisintop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,180 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, creamy).

  4. Flour + buttertop 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).

Flour and butter 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

Flour
Forms the structure that holds the cake together as it bakes.
Butter
Adds fat that tenderises the crumb and carries flavour.
Milk
Adds moisture that hydrates the flour and forms the dough.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in buttermilk or sour milk to produce gas that lifts the cake.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the cake brown and stay moist.

The step that matters

Adding the baking soda with the milk. Baking soda only leavens when it meets an acid. Buttermilk or sour milk supplies that acid, so the soda must be mixed in evenly with the milk. Uneven mixing leaves pockets of soda that taste bitter and rise unevenly.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar, raisin, butter, 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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