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Dessert

White Lincoln Cake

A light, fluffy cake made with sugar, butter, flour, sweet milk, egg whites, cream of tartar, baking soda, and optional corn starch.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

White Lincoln 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. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

Make the batter

  1. Cream together the sugar and butter until light and fluffy.

  2. Add the flour, sweet milk, egg whites, cream of tartar, and baking soda. Mix until smooth.

  3. If desired, substitute 1 cup of flour with corn starch.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour the batter into prepared cake pans.

  2. Bake until a toothpick comes out clean.

  3. Use lemon filling between the layers.

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

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

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  4. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Egg whites
Provide structure and lift as they set in the baked cake.
Cream of tartar
Stabilizes the egg whites and helps the cake keep a light, fine texture.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the batter to produce gas that makes the cake rise.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and flavor, and traps air when creamed with sugar.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps create a light texture when creamed with butter.
Flour
Forms the main structure of the cake as its proteins set during baking.

The step that matters

Creaming the sugar and butter. Beating until light and fluffy traps air in the fat, which helps the cake rise and gives it a tender crumb. Under-creaming leaves a denser cake.

“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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