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Dessert

Lady Baltimore Cake

A sponge cake with butter, sugar, flour, sweet milk, egg whites, almond extract, raisins, nuts, and figs, topped with a sugar glaze.

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. Gradually add the flour, sweet milk, and baking powder, mixing well.

  4. Fold in the stiffly beaten egg whites gently.

  5. Pour the batter into prepared cake pans and bake until golden.

Make the filling

  1. For the filling, boil 1 cup of sugar and ½ cup of boiling water until it spins a thread.

  2. Stir in the stiff egg whites, then add the chopped raisins, nuts, and figs.

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. Almond + raisintop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,781 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  3. Flour + almondtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Almond + nutstop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together394 recipes

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

  5. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Butter
Creamed with sugar to trap air, giving the cake a light, tender crumb and rich flavor.
Egg whites
Whipped and folded in to add air and structure, helping the cake rise and set.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake together as it bakes.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter to make the cake rise.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps create a tender, browned crumb.

The step that matters

Boil the filling sugar to the thread stage. Sugar syrup must reach the right concentration to set into a spreadable filling; underboiled syrup stays runny, while overboiled syrup turns hard and brittle as it cools.

Swap the nuts

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

  1. Pistachiofits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Brazil nutfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, flour, milk, egg, almond, 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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