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Dessert

White Mountain Jelly Cake

A butter, sugar, flour, milk, egg, and baking soda cake with a white egg‑white frosting.

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

White Mountain Jelly 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 batter

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

  2. In a large bowl, combine butter and sugar, then mix in flour and milk.

  3. Add eggs, cream of tartar, and baking soda (dissolved in milk).

  4. Stir all ingredients together without separating the eggs.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into a prepared cake pan and bake until golden.

Frost and assemble

  1. For frosting, beat the egg whites and gradually add fine white sugar until stiff peaks form.

  2. Spread frosting between 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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, 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

Flour
Forms the main structure that holds the cake's crumb together as it bakes.
Eggs
Add structure and binding, helping the batter hold together and set in the oven.
Butter
Adds fat that tenderizes the crumb and contributes richness and flavor.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps it brown while keeping the crumb tender.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the batter to release gas that helps the cake rise.
Cream of tartar
Provides acidity that reacts with baking soda to help the cake rise.

The step that matters

Beating the egg whites for the frosting. Adding sugar gradually while beating lets the whites form a stable foam. Adding it all at once or overbeating can leave the frosting grainy, soft, or collapsed, so stop when stiff peaks form.

“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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