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Dessert

Poor Man's Cake, Nice for Cottage Pudding

A simple cake made with sugar, butter, flour, milk, eggs, baking powder, vanilla, nutmeg, and a sweet sauce of sugar, cornstarch, and boiling water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and vanilla are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,187 recipes. Both carry ethyl caproate, which smells fruity, apple peel. The science ↓

Poor Man's Cake, Nice for Cottage Pudding

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

  3. Add the flour, sweet milk, eggs, baking powder, vanilla, and nutmeg. Mix well.

  4. Pour the batter into two greased cake pans and bake until golden.

Make the sauce

  1. For the sauce, mix 1 cup sugar with cornstarch and salt in a saucepan.

  2. Pour in 1½ pints of boiling water and stir until thickened.

  3. Remove from heat, then add nutmeg, vanilla, and butter. Stir until smooth.

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. Milk + vanillatop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,187 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Vanilla + nutmegtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,781 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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

Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure and richness as the cake sets.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and flavour in both the cake and the sauce.
Flour
Forms the main structure of the cake as it bakes.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking so the cake rises and becomes light.
Cornstarch
Thickens the sauce as it heats with the boiling water.

The step that matters

Stir the sauce while it thickens. Cornstarch must be stirred into the hot liquid to thicken evenly; if it sits unstirred it can form lumps and set unevenly.

Swap the nutmeg

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

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

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