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Dessert

Plum Cake

A baked cake made with flour, beef dripping, sugar, currants, lemon peel, nutmeg, salt, baking powder, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Plum 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.

Prepare

  1. Mix the salt and baking powder with the flour.

  2. Rub in the beef dripping.

  3. Add the sugar, currants, lemon peel, and grated nutmeg.

  4. Make a stiff dough with new milk.

Bake

  1. Pour the mixture into a buttered tin.

  2. Bake immediately at 350°F (175°C) for about an hour.

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. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Beef + milktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,759 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  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 milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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 main structure of the cake as the dough sets in the oven.
Beef dripping
Rubbed into the flour to add fat, giving the cake a tender, crumbly texture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the cake brown during baking.
Currants
Provide fruit pieces and moisture that stay soft as the cake bakes.
Baking powder
Releases gas when heated, helping the cake rise.
New milk
Hydrates the flour so the mixture binds into a stiff dough.

The step that matters

Bake immediately. Baking powder begins releasing gas as soon as it gets wet, so waiting before baking lets much of its lifting power escape and can leave the cake flat and dense.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, beef, sugar, lemon, nutmeg, milk):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, beef, sugar, lemon, nutmeg, milk. 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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