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Dessert

White Sponge Cake

A light, airy cake made from beaten egg whites, flour, sugar, cream of tartar, and baking soda.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

White Sponge Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Beat the egg whites well.

  2. Combine the baking soda and cream of tartar with the egg whites before adding the sugar.

  3. Gradually add the sugar and then fold in the flour.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into a prepared cake pan and bake until golden.

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. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + creamtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

  5. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Egg and flour 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

Egg whites
Whipped to foam, they trap air that lifts and gives the cake its airy structure.
Cream of tartar
Stabilizes the whipped egg whites, helping the foam hold its volume during mixing and baking.
White sugar
Added gradually to the whites, it sweetens the cake and helps stabilize the foam.
Flour
Folded in gently, it provides the starch structure that sets the cake's crumb.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic cream of tartar to add a small amount of lift to the batter.

The step that matters

Folding in the flour. Folding gently keeps the air bubbles in the whipped egg whites intact. Stirring or deflating the batter causes the cake to bake up dense instead of light.

“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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