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Dessert

Washington Pie

A butter-sugar batter with milk, eggs, baking soda, cream of tartar, and flour baked in pie pans.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Washington Pie

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 your oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. In a mixing bowl, cream together the butter and sugar.

  3. Add the milk and eggs, and mix well.

  4. In a separate bowl, combine the baking soda and cream of tartar with the flour.

  5. Gradually add the flour mixture to the wet ingredients until the batter is thick like pound cake.

Bake

  1. Divide the batter between two pie pans and bake until golden.

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. Milk + flourtop 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

Butter
Creams with the sugar to add richness and a tender crumb.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps brown the crust while creaming with the butter.
Eggs
Add structure and richness, helping the batter set as it bakes.
Baking soda
Reacts with the cream of tartar to release gas that lifts the batter.
Cream of tartar
Acid that works with the baking soda to help the cake rise.
Flour
Forms the structure of the batter that sets in the oven.

The step that matters

Gradually add the flour mixture to the wet ingredients. Adding flour gradually and mixing only until combined keeps the batter smooth and prevents overdeveloped gluten, which would make the cake tough. The batter should be thick like pound cake, so the rising agents can lift it evenly.

“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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