Name: Bath Cakes Another Way
Ingredients: 1 pound all-purpose flour; ½ pound fresh butter; 5 eggs; ¼ teaspoon salt; 1 teacup good yeast; ¼ pound sifted sugar; ½ ounce caraway seeds; a few cloves, pounded and sifted

Why it works: Flour and caraway match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,435 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Bath Cakes Another Way

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

Mix flour, butter, eggs, salt, and yeast together.
Place the mixture before a fire until it rises sufficiently.
Add sifted sugar, caraway seeds, and pounded cloves.

Shape and bake

Roll out into little cakes.
Bake on well-cleaned tins rubbed with butter.

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.

Flour + carawaytop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,435 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Caraway + clovetop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together143 recipes

Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).
Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together124,287 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together92,116 recipes

Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).
Flour + clovetop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together12,671 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Yeast: Causes the dough to rise, giving the cakes a light, airy crumb.
Eggs: Add structure and richness, helping the dough hold its shape and rise.
Butter: Adds fat for tenderness and rich flavour.
All-purpose flour: Forms the structure of the dough once mixed with liquid and eggs.
Sugar: Adds sweetness and helps the cakes brown during baking.

The step that matters

Letting the dough rise by the fire. The dough must rise fully before shaping, because yeast needs time and warmth to produce gas. Rising too little leaves dense cakes, and too much heat can kill the yeast.

Swap the clove

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

Cinnamonfits better
Nutmegfits better
Capersfits better
Clovethe original

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

Clove Cake53 recipes

White Cake431 recipes

Pound Cake373 recipes

Orange Bundt Cake349 recipes

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Bath Cakes Another Way