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Dessert

New Haven Commencement Cake

A yeast-based cake with sugar, butter, flour, nutmeg, cinnamon, eggs, raisins, citron, and optional vinegar or jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

New Haven Commencement 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. Cream together the sugar and butter until light and fluffy.

  2. Add the flour, yeast, grated nutmegs, cinnamon, and eggs. Mix well.

  3. Cover the mixture and let it rise overnight.

  4. In the morning, stir in the baking soda, chopped raisins, and chipped citron.

  5. Let the batter stand for 1 hour before baking.

Bake and finish

  1. Bake in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C) until golden.

  2. Ice the cake with your preferred icing.

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. Nutmeg + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Cinnamon + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

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

  4. Nutmeg + raisintop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-terpineol (lilac, floral).

  5. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Flour
Forms the structure that holds the cake's crumb together as it bakes.
Eggs
Add structure and richness, and help bind the batter.
Yeast
Produces gas during the overnight rise, leavening the batter.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and richness, and carries flavor.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps browning during baking.
Baking soda
Reacts with acidic ingredients to add lift and help browning.

The step that matters

Overnight rise. Yeast needs time and a warm, covered environment to produce gas and leaven the batter. Too little time leaves the cake dense, so the batter should be fully covered and left to rise before the baking soda is added.

Swap the raspberry

The recipe marks raspberry as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, butter, flour, nutmeg, cinnamon, egg, raisin):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Raspberrythe original

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