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Dessert

Grape Sauce Cake

A cake made with grape sauce, sour milk, spices, and a sugar filling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and nutmeg 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 ↓

Grape Sauce 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 cake batter

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. In a bowl, cream together the sugar and butter.

  3. Add the grape sauce, sour milk, baking soda, egg yolks, and spices; mix well.

  4. Gradually add the flour until combined.

  5. Divide the batter into layers.

Bake and make the filling

  1. Bake until golden.

  2. For the filling, combine 1 cup sugar with enough water to melt it.

  3. Boil the sugar mixture until it ropes.

  4. Remove from heat.

  5. Stir in the beaten egg whites until smooth.

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. Cinnamon + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Cinnamon + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Allspice + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,331 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  5. Grape + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,164 recipes

    Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Creams with the sugar to add fat and tenderness to the crumb.
Egg yolks
Add richness and help bind the batter into a set structure.
Flour
Forms the structure of the cake as it sets in the oven.
Baking soda
Reacts with the sour milk to produce gas that lifts the batter.
Grape sauce
Adds moisture, fruit flavour and colour to the batter.

The step that matters

Boil the sugar mixture until it ropes. Sugar must reach the correct concentration to form a stable syrup. Under-boiled syrup stays runny, while over-boiled syrup turns brittle or caramelizes, and the beaten egg whites need a syrup at the right temperature to stay light and glossy.

Swap the grape

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, sauce, milk, butter, cinnamon, allspice, nutmeg):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Grapethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, sauce, milk, butter, cinnamon, allspice, nutmeg. 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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