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Dessert

Lady Baltimore Cake

A sponge cake with a raisin, pecan, and fig filling.

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

Lady Baltimore 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.

Make the cake

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

  2. Cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy.

  3. Add the flour, milk, egg whites, baking powder, and rose water; mix until smooth.

  4. Pour the batter into prepared cake pans and bake until a toothpick comes out clean.

Make the filling

  1. For the filling, cook the granulated sugar and boiling water until it forms threads.

  2. Pour the syrup onto the beaten egg whites and mix well.

  3. Fold in the chopped raisins, pecan nuts, and figs.

Assemble

  1. Spread the filling between the layers of the cooled 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. 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. Raisin + nutstop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together490 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Butter + flourtop 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).

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

Butter
Adds fat and richness, and creams with sugar to trap air for a light crumb.
Flour
Forms the structure of the cake as it sets in the oven.
Egg whites
Add structure and lightness to the batter and to the beaten-egg filling.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, helping the cake rise.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps create a tender, light texture when creamed.
Pecan nuts
Add crunch and nutty flavour to the filling.

The step that matters

Pour the syrup onto the beaten egg whites. The hot sugar syrup must be poured slowly into the whipped whites while mixing, which cooks the egg whites and yields a stable, glossy filling. Pouring too fast can deflate them.

Swap the nuts

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Pistachiofits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

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