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Dessert

White Pound Cake

A light, airy cake made with powdered sugar, butter, egg whites, flour, and sweet milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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White Pound Cake

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 Pound 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 powdered sugar and butter.

  2. Add the well-beaten egg whites and beat for 10 minutes.

  3. Sift the cream of tartar and baking soda through the flour.

  4. Stir the flour mixture into the batter along with the sweet milk.

  5. Beat all ingredients together for 15 minutes.

Bake

  1. Bake in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C) for 45 minutes to 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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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

Egg whites
Whipped air and structure give the cake its light, airy crumb.
All-purpose flour
Gluten and starch form the cake's main structure as it bakes.
Butter
Fat tenderises the crumb and adds richness and flavour.
Cream of tartar
Acidity stabilises the egg whites and helps them hold their volume.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the batter to produce gas that helps the cake rise.
Powdered sugar
Sweetness and fine texture, dissolving smoothly into the butter.

The step that matters

Beating the egg whites. Well-beaten whites trap air that leavens the batter. Under-beaten whites give a dense cake, and the later long beating step can deflate them if overdone.

“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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