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Dessert

Jelly Roll

A rolled cake made from a butter, sugar, eggs, flour batter, topped with jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Jelly Roll

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the batter

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Cream the butter and sugar together.

  3. Add the beaten egg yolks and beat for 5 minutes.

  4. Fold in the stiffly beaten egg whites alternately with the sifted flour and baking powder.

  5. Pour the batter into a greased baking pan, spreading it less than ½ inch deep.

Bake and roll

  1. Bake until golden, then turn out while hot.

  2. Spread jelly over the cake and roll it up.

  3. Cover with paper and tie it in shape until cool.

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 + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Butter and flour 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

Eggs
Whites trapped by folding give the sponge its light, airy structure.
Butter
Creamed with sugar, it adds richness and tenderness to the crumb.
Sugar
Creamed with butter, it adds sweetness and helps give the cake its golden browning.
Flour
Sifted flour provides the structure that holds the thin cake together when rolled.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, helping the thin cake rise and stay light.

The step that matters

Rolling the hot cake. The cake must be turned out and rolled while still hot, because warm sponge is flexible; once cooled it cracks. Covering and shaping it until cool sets the curl.

“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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