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Dessert

Wedding-cake

A large cake made with flour, sugar, butter, eggs, currants, raisins, citron, spices, molasses, brandy, and baking soda.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and raisin match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Wedding-cake

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Cream the butter and sugar together.

  2. Add the thoroughly beaten eggs, molasses, brandy, and spices.

  3. Gently stir in the flour.

  4. Rub the fruit in flour from the 5 pounds before adding.

Fill and bake

  1. Slice the citron thin and layer it in the pans as you add the dough.

  2. Bake gently for 3 to 4 hours.

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 + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Raisin + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

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

  3. Flour + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Mace + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake together as it bakes.
Butter
Adds richness and a tender crumb when creamed with sugar.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure and lift to the crumb.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps create a tender texture when creamed with butter.
Currants
Add chewy fruit pieces and sweetness throughout the cake.
Molasses
Adds moisture, dark colour, and a deep sweetness.

The step that matters

Rub the fruit in flour before adding. Coating the currants and raisins in flour helps keep them suspended in the batter rather than sinking to the bottom during baking.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, sugar, butter, egg, currant, raisin, cinnamon):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Allspicefits better
  3. Clovefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar, butter, egg, currant, raisin, cinnamon. 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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