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Dessert

Yule Cake

A yeasted sweet bread with butter, sugar, sultanas, candied peel, nutmeg, and eggs, baked in a cake tin.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Yule Cake

Oven, in the book's wordsA fairly hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. Rub the butter into the warm flour.

  2. Add sugar and salt.

  3. Cream the yeast with a little sugar.

  4. Heat the milk and pour it onto the beaten egg.

  5. Add the milk mixture and creamed yeast to the flour.

  6. Knead well and let it rise in a warm place for 1 to 2 hours.

  7. Add the fruit and knead again.

Bake

  1. Place in a greased cake tin and let it rise well.

  2. Bake in a hot oven for 10 minutes, then reduce to moderate oven for 40 to 50 minutes.

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. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Flour and butter 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 structure of the dough that holds the rise and crumb.
Yeast
Produces gas that makes the dough rise and become light.
Butter
Adds richness and tenderness by coating the flour and softening the crumb.
Egg
Adds structure and richness, helping bind the dough.
Sultanas
Add sweetness, moisture and chewy texture throughout the cake.

The step that matters

Letting the dough rise in a warm place. Yeast works slowly in cold conditions, so the dough may not rise enough. Warmth lets the yeast produce gas steadily, giving the cake its light texture before baking.

Swap the nutmeg

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegthe original
  3. Jalapenofits less well
  4. Capersfits less well

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