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Dessert

Hickory-nut Custard Cake

A custard cake made with sugar, butter, eggs, milk, flour, baking powder, lemon flavoring, and hickory nuts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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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 ↓

Hickory-nut Custard Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Make the cake

  1. Cream together the sugar and butter.

  2. Add the beaten eggs, sweet milk, flour, baking powder, and lemon flavoring; mix well.

  3. Pour the batter into jelly pans and bake until golden.

Make the custard

  1. For the custard, heat the milk in a tin pail set in boiling water.

  2. Dissolve the corn starch in a little milk and add it to the boiling milk.

  3. Stir in the eggs, sugar, and chopped hickory nuts; mix well.

Assemble

  1. Spread the custard between the warm 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.

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. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + corntop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,165 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Lemon + corntop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,927 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, with the custard, add structure and richness to the layers.
Butter
Adds fat for a tender crumb and rich flavor in the cake.
Flour
Forms the main structure of the cake batter as it sets in the oven.
Corn starch
Thickens the milk so the custard sets into a spreadable filling.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the cake rises and becomes light.
Hickory-nut meats
Add crunch and a nutty flavor to the custard filling.

The step that matters

Adding the corn starch to the boiling milk. Corn starch must be dissolved in cold or cool milk first, then stirred into hot milk; added dry or lumpy it clumps and the custard turns grainy instead of smooth and thick.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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