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Dessert

Hickory Nut Cake

A sweet cake made with sugar, butter, flour, egg whites, sweet milk, cream of tartar, baking soda, and hickory nuts.

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 ↓

Hickory Nut 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).

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

  3. Add the egg whites and mix well.

Make the batter

  1. In another bowl, combine the flour, cream of tartar, and baking soda.

  2. Gradually add the dry ingredients to the wet mixture, alternating with the sweet milk.

  3. Fold in the hickory nut meats.

  4. Pour the batter into prepared square pans.

Bake

  1. Bake until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

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. Butter + flourtop 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).

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

Sugar
Sweetens the cake and, creamed with butter, helps give it a tender crumb.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and tenderness, and creaming it traps air for lift.
Egg whites
Provide structure and help the cake set and hold its rise.
Flour
Forms the main structure of the cake as the batter sets in the oven.
Cream of tartar
Acidifies the batter and stabilizes the egg whites, helping the cake rise evenly.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic cream of tartar to release gas that makes the cake rise.

The step that matters

Gradually add the dry ingredients, alternating with the milk. Adding flour and liquid in alternating portions keeps the batter smooth and emulsified, and avoids overmixing, which would toughen the crumb.

“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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