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Dessert

Portugal Cake

A sweet cake made with powdered sugar, flour, butter, raisins, citron, almonds, lemon juice or wine, and eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Portugal Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Beat the butter and powdered sugar together until smooth and very light.

  2. Add the egg yolks and beat again until well mixed and light.

  3. Beat the egg whites to a stiff froth.

  4. Add the egg whites alternately with the flour, reserving ½ cup of flour to rub with the fruit.

Add the fruit and bake

  1. Stir in the fruit and blanched, shredded almonds.

  2. Bake in paper‑lined pans.

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. Raisin + almondtop 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 + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Butter + almondtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,245 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Creams with the sugar to trap air and adds richness and a tender crumb.
Powdered sugar
Creams with the butter and adds sweetness while keeping the crumb fine.
Eggs
Yolks enrich and bind the batter; whipped whites add lift and a light structure.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake together once set.
Almonds
Add texture, nutty flavour and moistness to the crumb.
Fruit
Adds chewy pockets of sweetness and flavour throughout the cake.

The step that matters

Folding the egg whites with the flour. Whipped egg whites hold air that leavens the cake. Adding flour in alternation and stirring gently keeps the batter light, while overmixing deflates the foam and produces a dense cake.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Coconutfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

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