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Dessert

Green-and-silver Cake

A green spinach cake made with a silver-cake batter, butter, sugar, lemon, egg whites, and spinach juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Spinach and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,109 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Green-and-silver Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Make the green batter

  1. Prepare a silver-cake batter and reserve 1 cup.

  2. Mix the reserved batter with enough spinach juice to color it green, adding flour as needed.

  3. To make spinach juice, boil washed spinach leaves in an inner boiler until scalded, then squeeze through a cloth and cool.

Make the cake batter

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

  2. Whip in the lemon juice and grated peel.

  3. Add the stiffened egg whites alternately with the flour.

Bake

  1. Bake in a loaf pan or layer pans for jelly cake.

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. Spinach + lemontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,109 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

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

  3. Spinach + flourtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,564 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Egg whites
Whipped into foam, they add structure and lightness as the cake sets.
Butter
Creamed with sugar, it adds richness and a tender crumb.
Sugar
Creamed with butter, it sweetens the cake and helps give a tender texture.
Flour
Forms the structure that holds the cake together as it bakes.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking, helping the cake rise.
Milk
Adds moisture, keeping the crumb soft after baking.

The step that matters

Add the stiffened egg whites alternately with the flour. Egg whites hold air that gives the cake its lift. Folding them in gently, and alternating with the flour, keeps that air from being beaten out, so the cake stays light.

Swap the spinach

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

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Asparagusfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Spinachthe original

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