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Dessert

Deied Apple Cake

A moist fruit cake made with dried apples, molasses, raisins, nuts, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 17 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 ↓

Deied Apple Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the apples

  1. Soak the dried apples overnight.

  2. In the morning, boil the soaked apples slowly in dark molasses for 2 hours.

Make the batter

  1. Add sugar, butter, sour milk, flour, raisins, walnuts, citron, candied oranges, and lemon peel to the mixture.

  2. Stir in cloves, allspice, cinnamon, nutmeg, baking soda, and baking powder, then mix well and keep as a fruit 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. Apple + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,104 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  4. Molasses + sugartop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,225 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

All-purpose flour
Provides the starch and gluten network that gives the cake its structure.
Butter
Adds fat that tenderizes the crumb and carries flavor.
Sour milk
Adds moisture and acidity that reacts with the baking soda to help the cake rise.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic sour milk and molasses to produce gas that lifts the batter.
Dark molasses
Adds moisture, deep color, and a rich, slightly acidic sweetness.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps keep the cake moist and tender.

The step that matters

Boiling the apples in molasses. Simmering slowly for the full 2 hours softens the apples and thickens the molasses. Boiling too hard or too high can scorch the thick sugary mixture on the bottom of the pan.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Pistachiofits about as well
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, molasses, sugar, butter, milk, flour, 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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