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Dessert

Gilt-edge Cake

A layered cake with a sugar filling, made with flour, sugar, water, Cottolene, baking soda, cream of tartar, egg yolks, and egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and vanilla are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 35,032 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Gilt-edge Cake

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a quick oven”. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Make the cake

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

  2. In a bowl, mix sugar, flour, water, Cottolene, baking soda, cream of tartar, and egg yolks until smooth.

  3. Divide the batter into three layers and bake until golden.

Make the filling

  1. For the filling, combine ¾ cup sugar with enough water to dissolve, then boil.

  2. Add beaten egg whites to the boiling mixture and mix well.

  3. Stir in vanilla and lemon juice.

Assemble

  1. Spread the filling between the layers and on top of the 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. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  2. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Flour + vanillatop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,241 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Vanilla + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,961 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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
Provides the structure that holds the cake's layers together as it bakes.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps keep the crumb tender and moist.
Cottolene
Adds fat that tenderizes the crumb and gives a soft texture.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in cream of tartar to produce gas that lifts the batter.
Cream of tartar
Acts as an acid that reacts with baking soda, helping the cake rise and stay light.
Egg whites
Whipped into the hot syrup, they add air and help the filling set light and fluffy.

The step that matters

Adding the egg whites to the boiling syrup. The whites must be beaten and added while the syrup is hot and mixed well. The hot sugar cooks the egg proteins and sets them into a light, stable filling rather than a runny or lumpy one.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Blueberryfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, flour, cream, egg, vanilla. 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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