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Dessert

Family Cake

A cake made from rice, flour, eggs, sugar, and caraway seeds, baked at 350°F for one hour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and caraway match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,435 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Family 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.

Make the batter

  1. Beat the eggs for 30 minutes.

  2. Add the rice, flour, sugar, and caraway seeds to the beaten eggs.

  3. Mix well and pour into a baking pan.

Bake

  1. Bake at 350°F (175°C) for 1 hour.

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 + carawaytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,435 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Rice + carawaytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together64 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Rice + flourtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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
Beaten to trap air, giving the cake lift and a light, airy structure.
Flour
Provides starch and gluten that set during baking to give the cake its body.
Rice
Adds bulk and a tender, slightly grainy texture to the crumb.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the cake brown as it bakes.
Caraway seeds
Contribute a distinctive aromatic, slightly anise-like flavour.

The step that matters

Beat the eggs for 30 minutes. Long beating incorporates air into the eggs, and that trapped air is what lifts the cake. Under-beaten eggs give a dense result, so the foam must be well developed before the dry ingredients are folded in.

Swap the caraway

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Turmericfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Carawaythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, flour, egg, sugar. 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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